Squid Game Chooses Chaotic Evil
How many bad actions do you have to commit to become a bad person?
In the first episode of the Netflix series Squid Game, people in a desperate amount of debt sign away their rights and are kidnapped and taken to a remote island where they play children’s games. The one catch though, is if the players lose the game they are killed.
In the second episode, the players take a majority vote to stop the games, and are released from the island and dropped back off into the real world. This freedom of choice — the quick out — is unusual.
What’s even more unusual is that when the players are given another chance to return to the deadly games, many of them do.
In most cases, the way that we create and heighten drama is by taking away options — we put people in an enclosed space and wait for them to start fighting. This space can be literal, like the island in Lord of the Flies or the house in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but it can also be situational, like Tony Soprano being a mob boss because his father was in the mob and he can’t leave. By giving its characters the option to escape at any time (admittedly, into a hard and unjust world) Squid Game becomes a much more sinister character study. As bad as the games are, the players still choose to return, and thus still choose to inflict violence on others for profit.
The show leans heavily into the murkiness around moral relativism, and because the societal norms of the games are constantly shifting, the players’ ethical walls are slowly broken down. On a macro level, the society inside the game doesn’t have fixed, longstanding rules. At first, the gaming areas are the only place where violence occurs, but as time goes on, players start fighting each other outside of the games as well. In early games, players make alliances and work together, but in later ones they are forced to play against their allies. For some, this creates internal conflict as they continually have to re-justify the morality of their actions, while for others they merely see how far they can push the limits of what the game will allow. Yet the people loving the game and the people hating the game are engaging in the same actions, actions that are coded as “bad” in the real world but perhaps morally neutral in this world. So the question becomes, should all of them feel guilt or should none of them feel guilt?
On a micro level, the idea of a slowly eroding moral code also part of what makes the anti-hero debate so interesting. These shows question at what point someone go beyond the “rules” of their world (like drug dealing in Breaking Bad or mob life in The Sopranos) and act in a way that is so immoral that it definitively proves they’re a “bad person.” Ultimately this question leads us back to choice. Who chooses to be purposefully cruel and who chooses to play by the rules but go no farther? Or to broaden the scope, are the forces that push them into these worlds worse than the actions they commit inside of them? Many of these people are trying to get the money for their families, but the cost of that good intention is steep and the the option to just leave and stop the violence (if the majority agrees) is always there. Staying is a choice in and of itself.
This may seem ultimately like a barrage of existential questions — a fevered search to find out at what point the scale tips from “good person in bad situation” to “bad person in bad situation” — but splashing around in this muddy area of ethics is why Squid Game is so compelling.