That F@%*ing Scene : They're Not Playing the Actual Squid Game
If you haven’t done so already, please stop reading this article and go watch Squid Game.
It’s a good (not great) show with a wild what-if premise, colorful visuals and a shitload of crazy, gory violence. The plot is ridiculous, but creator Hwang Dong-hyuk really makes up for it with great characters who experience a grueling journey against their will. For today’s scene breakdown, I’m interested in the end of two of these characters’ journey and I’m going to spoil the shit out of it. So go watch it. It’s kind of worth it. But only kind of.
This particular scene in Squid Game’s ultimate episode addresses one of my biggest pet peeves in cinema and television: fight scenes. I think most fight scenes suck because they’re trying to express the wrong thing. Instead of being an expression of struggle, they’re a highly choreographed expression of gracefulness and physical dominance. That makes for an endless streak of punches and kicks without any consequence. That doesn’t happen here.
What happens here is that our protagonist Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) and his bro-turned-foe Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo) are supposed to play a last of a of a series of stupid child games to which the winner will earn a fortune and the loser will earn a bullet to the head. But that’s not quite what happens either. They are too fucking angry at each other to comply with life threatening orders. I don’t know about you, but I’d have to be pretty fucking angry to do that.
Let’s see what actually happens
Why is a sloppy fight between two miserable Korean dudes so enthralling?
I’ve identified four reasons:
They’re not even supposed to fight. These two guys are not challenging each other’s manhood. They’re not having a fair competition over who’s the toughest. Physical confrontation erupts from an ideological disagreement that transgressed ethical boundaries. It’s an emotional climax of an otherwise unresolvable conflict, just like fistfights (well knife fights) are in real life. They’re not proper and they don’t have anything to do with dick-measuring martial arts.
If you’re ever fought in a bar or even in the school yard, you know what I mean. You rarely actually decide to fight. One of the two antagonists in any conflict just gets so fucking riled up, he ends up throwing hands. Gi-hun and Sang-woo aren’t fighting pretty. They don’t have technique. But what they have is eight episodes worth of pent-up anger.
They’re not fighting over money (at least one of them isn’t). What makes Gi-hun such a rabidly likable character is that he isn’t one at the start. He’s a scumbag and a deadbeat father who’s life is completely controlled by money. The money he owes, but also the money he isn’t giving his mother and the one he’s not using to pay for his share of his estranged daughter’s upbringing. By the end of his terrifying ordeal, my man’s gained principles.
In this scene, he’s not trying to kick Sang-woo’s ass in order to get the money, although Sang-woo is definitely trying to murder him for that reason. No, Gi-hun is angry because his friend killed another character out of pure fucking greed. In the beginning, he looked up to Sang-woo. His friend was a beacon of financial and professional success to him. But now, Gi-hun sees him for who he truly is and he thinks that person should get his ass kicked.
Sang-woo’s torment. If you’ve watched the scene in its entirety already, you know how it ends. Not only Sang-woo feels pretty bad about what he just did (slitting an injured, defenseless woman’s throat), but he’s also pretty shattered by Gi-hun’s refusal to give his life up. For once in his life, he doesn’t have his way. He cannot have his way. He realizes that there’s an alternative to how he decided to live his life and does, you-know-what to himself. It works beautifully.
Symbolism. When Gi-hun and Sang-woo start fighting each other, something interesting happens: it starts raining. One of the characters involved with the organization of the game says something along the lines of: good rain always knows when to fall. Our two contestants process to roll in the dirt while punching, kicking and stabbing each other, but the washes it all off. It also washes off any blood, sweat and grime they had on them.
It’s a powerful image. It indicates that their torment will soon be over. Because of that, it wrenches tension in the scene. Since the characters are washed from their experience, it seems like something inevitable and unrepairable is going to happen and guess what? It does. Gi-hun and Sang-woo’s fight is not aesthetically pleasing, but it’s an emotional catharsis of the greatest magnitude. It’s perhaps the best 10-15 minutes of television I watched all year.
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