Squid Game thoughts – NO SPOILERS

Something that spoiled the experience somewhat is the casual attitude of some of the characters, especially the main character, Gi-hun. In between the games, he interacts with other players almost like they are actually playing real children’s games for no stakes, instead of playing for their lives.
Before many of the games, his demeanor seems to veer far toward, hey, let’s all go out and have fun.
More than once he pleads to the guards that one of the other players is in some kind of medical distress, as if they would care.
I am not talking about his extreme kindness to many of the other players. To me, these are his best moments. They reveal who he really is, especially his interactions with the old man.
But many of the in-between-games scenes seem so dissonant. Like, do these people not understand the stakes? Have they not been here the whole time? The husband and wife team were especially puzzling.
I want to make this a flaw and ask how the creators of the show could miss this. But that presumes they don’t know what they’re doing or that I know their story and their craft better than they do.
So why would they do it? The answer must lay in the characters.
For Gi-hun, without giving away any spoilers, it’s that he’s a gambler. Though he is constantly losing, he also wins big sometimes and he thinks every bet is going to go that way.
For Gi-hun and many of the other characters, we find out somewhere along the way that they don’t think they have anything to lose.
Also, it’s a bizarre situation, almost science fiction or fantasy, so who’s to say what is a reasonable action in a crazy world?
So ultimately, I think it works.
Part of the reason it works is the second episode.
I watched the first episode at night. I was not ready for how hard it hit. I thought, I might not be able to take a second episode, especially so late at night. I knew if I bailed out, I probably would never come back. But I wanted to find out what happens. So I pressed on.
It was a good move because Episode Two might be the most important. It’s the one where you get to know the most about several of the main characters and what’s at stake for them, and thereby, what is at stake for you, the viewer.
I heard a guy on the radio say almost the opposite. He said the second episode is boring and just stick with it past that one and the show gets great. He was a sports radio guy so it’s not much of a surprise that he would prefer the other episodes featuring intense, life-and-death competition to the episode that reveals the players’ wants, needs, pressures, fears – their characters.
So there you go, it’s character, who you are, that determines how you react.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

American Buffalo in Marysville

Image
If you've taken an acting class, you might have done an Uta Hagen exercise requiring you to perform a two-minute slice of life.  Just you, on stage, silently doing something you might do on an ordinary day.  Maybe you're ironing.  Maybe you're making a sandwich.  The point is for the audience to see you acting naturally.  It's not as easy as it sounds. American Buffalo , now playing at Red Curtain Foundation for the Arts in Marysville starts out with an Uta Hagen exercise, basically.  Scott B. Randall plays Donny Dubrow, the owner of a junk store.  Before the house lights even fade down, Donny comes on stage and begins doing what he might do on any typical morning.  He has his coffee cup in hand.  He straightens up this. He looks at that.  He takes a small trash can out into the alleyway and empties it.  He goes out the front door to get the morning newspaper.  It's engrossing to watch all the things he does and guess or conclude why he does them. It's a pe
Read more

The White Snake by ReAct

Image
Last week, I read Theatre of the Unimpressed by Jordan Tannahill. The book rages – artfully – against plays that never ask themselves the question, why does this need to be done in front of a live audience. It’s a happy coincidence, then that the first play I have seen since reading the book was The White Snake , produced by ReAct and now playing at 12th Avenue Arts. The show knows exactly why it needs to be done in front of a live audience. It’s because it goe s back to the roots of theater, people telling stories to one another, to the audience, to me. It’s a beautiful story, simply told. At the top, three actors begin narrating directly to the audience, spooling out playwright Mary Zimmerman’s version of the Chinese legend, dating in written form to the Ming Dynasty. After the context is set, three other actors begin playing the parts of White Snake, Green Snake, and Xu Xian as the narrators and the rest of the ensemble begin playing various other parts, including a monk, a
Read more

Merchant of Venice: The Musical

Image
Key plot elements, if you don’t know the show: Antonio, a Venetian merchant, borrows money from Shylock, who is Jewish. The money is to help Antonio’s friend, Bassanio, to woo Portia, a sort of wealthy heiress. Meanwhile, Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, yearns to escape her father and her Jewish identity by marrying Lorenzo, a Christian. When Antonio is unable to pay back the money, Shylock believes he finally has the chance to have the power of the law on his side. It’s an illusion. Shylock loses everything.  My first thought, halfway through Act One was, I want to go out to the lobby at intermission and buy the soundtrack. The music grabbed me from the very first number and never let me go.  This is not Phantom or Rent, though, where you can just do that. It’s a brand new show, and I saw its first public performance. But it had that quality. I wanted to be able to shove the CD into my car’s player and listen on the way home. It's a staged reading. At the same time there are props, c
Read more