Recently, like most of us, I watched and enjoyed the Squid Game series on Netflix. It’s new and different, horrible and exciting at the same time. It’s a kind of story we want to watch from the safety of our houses, telling ourselves that it is fiction; it hasn’t happened in real life. Hopefully, it never will.
While watching the episode, when the VIPs arrived, I felt disgusted with their attitude, their will to observe human beings competing in a deadly tournament. Then I realised that I had just done the same. We all did.
Years ago, when the Hunger Games series came out, we were all outraged at the Capitol. We hated their privileged style of life and their will to celebrate the annual games, where over twenty children had to die in violent circumstances. Now, we all watched way over four hundred people die for a promise of a fortune. It made me wonder about our lives, our condition as human beings, our morals. I guess it is a sense of detachment from the fate of the fictional characters that allowed us to watch it. It can be understood as a twisted form of voyeurism. Or maybe, deep inside, on some fundamental level, we are still the crowd that watched the gladiators fight in the arena and asked for more.
A bookish daydream 