"... that should stop us in our tracks.... Maybe the viewers of 'Squid Game' just thrill to the bold, cartoon-colored shock of it: Its visual and spiritual aesthetic are what you’d get if you crossed an episode of 'Teletubbies' with a highlights reel of Quentin Tarantino at his grisliest.... Then there’s the indiscriminate manner in which a huge hit becomes an even bigger phenomenon — a trend — divorced from its actual content.... The Times also published an article by Vanessa Friedman about how track suits were newly 'hot' because the 'Squid Game' contestants wear them (as a kind of prison uniform, mind you). The Times published another article, by Christina Morales, about the history of dalgona candy, which is a deadly prop in one of the series’s elimination contests. There was a link to instructions, by Genevieve Ko, on how to make it.
In a week and a half, on Halloween, we’ll be bombarded by 'Squid Game' costumes.... To some extent, 'Squid Game' is big because it’s big, its first-burst popularity generating attention that begets even greater popularity as everyone wants in on the action and as a curiosity’s slippery tentacles reach farther and farther into people’s consciousness.
But its commentary on class, greed and savagery is much too central to be incidental... [T]his portrait of life as a sadistic lottery and poverty as a hopeless torture chamber has resonance...."
1. Young people have been watching horror and violence for decades. Consumers have a taste for what they've consumed in the past. It's the kind of thing where to give more of the same, you have to give it more intensely and in a greater dose. The manufacturers of violent material do what they know they need to do to keep shocking.
2. But maybe it's not just a taste for horror and violence. Maybe it's the critique of capitalism that "has resonance." Bruni assumes that viewers begin with a gloomy attitude and that the show is confirming their pessimism. He does not consider the possibility that the show is anti-capitalism propaganda, designed to infect the mind of the young — not just to play with their pre-existing angst, but to direct their thinking.
3. Bruni provides some criticism of the New York Times. Once something is popular, it generates life-style articles that ride on the trend. He gives us some evidence, but doesn't observe the genderedness of this phenomenon. I can't help observing that his examples are articles written by women and the subjects — food and fashion — are stereotypically female.
पोस्ट्स
