by Olivia Beaty
****Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for Squid Game, Season 1****
The world’s obsession with the Netflix Original Squid Game continues, with people creating online multiplayer forums to replicate the games, costumes for their dogs, and a plethora of TikToks.
The making of the series took a physical toll on its creator, however. Writer and director Hwang Dong-hyuk poured his entire self into this series, claiming he lost six teeth due to stress. His efforts were well worth it. While the shock factor of people dying in the games is fascinating to watch, the real magic of the series is in Dong-hyuk’s masterful building of tension before and between the games. It is one of the few series you need to re-watch to fully appreciate its brilliance.
No scene highlights Dong-hyuk’s genius better than the claw game in Episode One. While there is not sufficient evidence to claim this arcade game was planted by the shadowy game masters, this scene does foreshadow events that will occur as the series progresses.
The claw game scene shows the viewers that Seong Gi-Hun will choose to participate in Squid Game, will need help to achieve victory, will ultimately win the competition, and will find only death and disappointment in his triumph. You can only truly appreciate Dong-hyuk’s efforts by closely examining the imagery in this pivotal scene.
First Children’s Game
The first game in the series Squid Game is not Red Light, Green Light, nor is it the initiation game of Ddjaki. Rather, the first children’s game shown is the arcade claw crane where main character Seong Gi-Hun attempts to win a gift for his daughter.
The scene begins right after Seong begs for the return of the 10,000 won he had gifted to the gambling clerk. It is all the money he currently owns. Rather than using the money to buy a gift outright for his daughter, which would be a normal or rational choice, he instead chooses to gamble it at the arcade in hopes of winning one. His choice here to gamble everything for the chance of a prize foreshadows his later choice to gamble with his life in the Squid Game.
The claw game also shows the viewers that Seong will need help to achieve victory, specifically introducing a character who helps him like the old man, Oh Il-nam, later will. Initially, Seong is terrible at the claw game and rapidly loses his money. His luck only turns when a kid gives him a lesson on how to beat the game and helps him win, just as the old man will later advise him and help him survive the early stages of the competition.
The child advises Seong that to win, “You need to stop and pick the prize you want first.” Seong takes his advice, and a brief glimpse is shown of Seong pointing out the black box the child will win for him. Seong literally chooses the only prize in the entire claw game that resembles the imagery of the later Squid Game, just as he will later choose not once, but twice, to participate.
Black Box Imagery
Once Seong actively chooses a prize, he wins. His choice is a prerequisite both here and in the competition to his victory. In the arcade, he wins a black box tied with a ribbon. It is notably tied in a similar way to the black boxes characteristic of the game’s invitations and coffins. The only difference is that the ribbon is a different color, a muted gold rather than a bright pink.
Image Credit: Netflix
Image Credit: Netflix
Later, when Seong’s daughter opens the box, the tissue paper is the same bright pink seen throughout the Squid Game series, on the coffins, invitations, and uniforms of the staff.
Using colors and shapes, Dong-hyuk is whispering to the viewers to pay attention to the meaning behind this scene and the gift chosen by Seong.
Nestled in the pink tissue paper is gun that looks remarkably real despite being a lighter. The gun in this case symbolizes death. Just as the daughter’s black box contains the image of death, so too will the later black boxes contain either invitations to die or actual corpses of the fallen.
Thematic Foreshadowing
The series juxtaposes innocent childhood games with violent death. As the daughter holds up the gun and smiles, writer Dong-hyuk presents us with an image that encapsulates this theme, as an innocent young girl holds a symbol of death.
Scrambling to justify his gift to his daughter, Seong quickly makes up an explanation about why he “chose” it for her. He rambles on about how women are more equal nowadays, and without that discrimination, they are even going to war nowadays. His focus on equality mirrors the explanation later given by the Front Man in Episodes 5 and 6. The Front Man intensely accuses a staff member caught giving advice to a contestant of ruining the “most important aspect of this place: equality.” Before killing him, the Front Man mentions inequality and discrimination, the only other time beside Seong’s justification we see these terms.
Just like Seong did not truly choose the gun for his daughter based on equality, the series later reveals Squid Game was also not truly formed to grant equality. Rather, the games were formed by a bored rich man and his bored rich friends.
In Seong’s choices to play the claw game and to play Squid Game, he fails in his ultimate goal: connection with his daughter. She is not able to use or keep the gift, and while she is sweet about it, it is clear she sees through her dad’s excuses. Then later, while Seong wins the competition, he is ultimately not able to provide her a home in South Korea, which was his original intention.
The claw game and dinner with his daughter scenes only take four minutes end to end. Yet in these four minutes, director-writer Hwang Dong-hyuk packs in all this foreshadowing. Moments like this show the careful attention he gave to the smallest moments, which is ultimately why the series completely captured the imaginations of the world.
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