Korean films and dramas’ emergence as one of the established categories to global audiences further increases production of diverse genres such as crime, thriller, and zombie-themed drama containing harsh criticism of contemporary Korean social ills and the systematization of inequality and class divide. Depiction of brutal, illegitimate human organ trade towards the marginalized and the poor criticizes socioeconomic and political issues of economic inequality, capitalism, and the widening gap between rich and poor.

The recent global hit Netflix drama Squid Game portrays the male protagonist Kihoon, a delinquent debtor, who is forced to sign a body waiver as collateral, leading him to play a survival game to pay back his debt. Although the causes of its global popularity drew more on children’s games and the structure of survival games, the commodification of human bodies and necropolitics of human sovereignty underscores dystopian prospects for human vulnerability and submission to the power of capitalism and mammonism.

The area of exertion of necropower is becoming economic rather than political. The reason necropower operates in Squid Game relates to both global and local. Globally, capitalism and class issues are permeating everywhere, and locally, the degrading of humanity through organ trade reflects the Korean historical past of military dictatorship and state-led developmentalism along with deeply-rooted authoritarian culture and familism. The cinematic representations of necropower in Squid Game indicate that as Korean contents combine global genre conventions with some twists, K-films and dramas have passed far from the earlier version of the hallyu wave as a symbol of soft power or Korean nationalistic tool.

Keywords:

Necropower, Organ trade, Capitalism and class issues

Reference list:

Mbembe, Achille. 2008. “Necropolitics.” In Foucault in an Age of Terror, 152–82. Springer.

Lowenstein, Adam. 2005. Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. Columbia University Press.

Kwak, Hyŏn-cha. 2009. “A Sociopsychological Study of Korean Gangsters - Narratives and Visual Conventions.” Media & Society,17(4),78-121.