The third season of Squid Game is available on Netflix and, like the previous ones, has the great merit of turning on the spotlight on extremely topical issues. The plot is apparently trivial: indebted people or ludopathy people are pushed to participate in children’s games, where to win means obtaining a huge sum of money, while losing is equivalent to dying. Nothing particularly original, at first glance. Still, Squid Game is not limited to entertaining the viewer with his Splatter violence: he always manages to introduce new social dynamics among the participants and, above all, invites us to put different ethical issues. First of all, each character seems to represent a moral archetype. The protagonist, Gi-Hun, embodies the man with an incorruptible, almost utopian ethics, who-like a superhero of comics-fights evil without ever letting himself be corrupt.

The disparity between rich and poor

At the opposite extreme we find instead those who are willing to do anything to survive or obtain the rich prize pool. In fact, there are two great variables that push the characters of Squid Game to betray any ethical value: the fear of dying and greed. And there seem to be limits to the immorality that can be generated by these two forces. As absurd as the universe of Squid Game may appear, unfortunately reality always exceeds our imagination. If we remove the fluorescent colors and the childhood aesthetics, what remains is not so dissimilar from the show that the Romans staged in their amphitheatres. The unfortunate protagonists of the series are painted in all respects as modern slaves, made vulnerable by poverty and used as entertainment for the rich. And it is precisely here that the great criticism is concretized – not too veiled – that permeates the whole universe of Squid Game: the demonization of liberal capitalism and its dynamics, which on the one hand push to consume compulsively, generating dependencies of all kinds, and on the other they widen the scissor between super rich and poor more and more. Curious, among other things, that Squid Game 3 bait just while in Italy the controversies on Jeff Bezos’ multimillionary marriage in Venice infurious. It is evident that the growing disparity between rich and poor is feeding the discontent of the last, which more and more often are convinced that wealth is intrinsically immoral. An idea that is anything but new. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the sucker of a needle, that a rich man enters the kingdom of God,” Jesus said to an wealthy man who refused to give up his material goods to follow him in ascetic life. The idea that wealth is the genres well -being for everyone therefore seems to convince less and less people: by those who criticize liberal capitalism with knowledge, to those who simply be overwhelmed by envy.

Understand Squid Game

To understand Squid Game, however, it is also important to analyze the South Korean context, where materialistic and consumer dynamics seem to have actually attacked. It is no coincidence that the South Korean filmography continues to produce works on this theme: from the parasite Oscar -winning film, to the lesser known Castaway on the Moon, up to The 8 Show, another Netflix series reminiscent of Squid Game. Stress, anxiety, depression: signs that seem to indicate that the hypercompetition to which contemporary society pushes us is not necessarily functional to our well -being. The dream of wealth – understood as having much more than necessary – appears more and more as an illusion, a need induced by the socio -cultural system in which we live. But really human beings are willing to betray any ethical principle in the face of money? Squid Game seems to offer us a tendentially pessimistic response, but leaving even a glimmer of hope turned on. Even in an extreme and deprived context, such as that of mortal games, there are still those who do not derogate from their moral values, those who fight for good, ignoring money and sometimes even sacrificing their lives for strangers.

The real question

Whether this is realistic or not, Squid Game has the merit of bringing the viewer to ask himself a question: how would I behave in a similar situation? The hope, of course, is to never have to discover it, although the social dynamics that develop between participants can be considered as an extreme and fictional version of what we live every day. Is liberal capitalism really transforming us into greedy and unscrupulous monsters? Or is it an ideological and pessimistic vision of society? Everyone draws his own conclusions, but the question – willingly or nolent – concerns us all very close.