A factory transformed into a battlefield, police firing tasers at strikers, an activist who spends 100 days at the top of a chimney: “Squid Game”, including the second season comes out Thursday, December 26by its creator's own admission, has its roots in a very real brutality, inherent to social relations in South Korea.
“Squid Game,” Netflix's most-watched series of all time – also a huge hit in South Korea – features desperate characters competing in deadly versions of children's games to try to win a huge amount of money.
In the second season, which premieres Thursday, the main character is still Seong Gi-hun, a divorced father and former worker thrown out on the street by an automobile group, Dragon Motors.
Inspired by social conflicts in South Korea
Even though it is fiction, the director and screenwriter of “Squid Game”, Hwang Dong-hyeok, claims to have inspired by a real chapter in the sometimes bloody history of social conflicts in South Korea : the occupation of the Ssangyong factory in Pyeongtaek, near Seoul, in 2009.
Dragon Motors, Gi-hun's former employer, is also a clear reference to Ssangyong (“twin dragon” in Korean).
In May 2009, Ssangyong Motor, a struggling company taken over by a consortium of banks and private investors, announces layoffs of more than 2,600 peopleor almost 40% of the staff.
It was the start of an occupation of the factory and a 77-day strike. The movement ended with a battle of incredible violence between strikers armed with slingshots and steel pipes and police using rubber bullets, tasers and helicopters who sprayed tear gas on the workers. Many trade unionists were particularly beaten up.
The conflict does not end there. Five years later, a union leader, Lee Chang-kun, remained perched at the top of one of the factory chimneys for 100 days, to denounce a judgment ruling in favor of Ssangyong against the strikers. He is then supplied with food using a basket hung on a rope and is prey to hallucinations.
Suicides of former employees
After the events, more than 200 workers face prosecution
and nearly a hundred – including Mr Lee – are imprisoned. These legal torments, after the trauma of the social conflict, strain the finances and mental health of workers.
According to Mr. Lee, since 2009, around thirty protagonists of the Ssangyong movement committed suicide or have succumbed to illnesses directly linked to stress.
Like the Oscar-winning film “Parasite” and K-pop stars like BTS, “Squid Game” embodies the “Korean Wave,” the name given to the country's rise to prominence. of global cultural power after its economic “miracle” of previous decades.
Coincidentally, the second season arrives on screens at a time when South Korea is going through a new major political crisis, after Parliament adopted an impeachment motion against President Yoon Suk Yeol for his failed attempt to impose the martial law.
Many South Korean fictions, like “Squid Game,” are rooted in the country’s real-life violence.
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