A manufacturing facility became a battlefield, riot police armed with tasers and an activist who spent 100 days atop a chimney — the unrest that impressed Netflix’s most profitable present ever has all of the hallmarks of a TV drama.
This month sees the discharge of the second season of “Squid Game”, a dystopian imaginative and prescient of South Korea the place determined folks compete in lethal variations of conventional youngsters’s video games for an enormous money prize.
But whereas the present itself is a piece of fiction, Hwang Dong-hyuk, its director and author, has stated the experiences of the principle character Gi-hun, a laid-off employee, have been impressed by the violent Ssangyong strikes in 2009.
“I wanted to show that any ordinary middle-class person in the world we live in today can fall to the bottom of the economic ladder overnight,” he has stated.
In May 2009, Ssangyong, a struggling automotive large taken over by a consortium of banks and personal traders, introduced it was shedding greater than 2,600 folks, or practically 40 p.c of its workforce.
That was the start of an occupation of the manufacturing facility and a 77-day strike that resulted in clashes between strikers armed with slingshots and metal pipes and riot police wielding rubber bullets and tasers.
Many union members have been severely crushed and a few have been jailed.
The battle didn’t finish there.
Five years later, union chief Lee Chang-kun held a sit-in for 100 days on high of one of many manufacturing facility’s chimneys to protest a sentence in favor of Ssangyong towards the strikers.
He was provided with meals from a basket connected to a rope by supporters and endured hallucinations of a tent rope reworked right into a writhing snake.
Some who skilled the unrest struggled to debate “Squid Game” due to the trauma they endured, Lee informed AFP.
The repercussions of the strike, compounded by protracted authorized battles, precipitated vital monetary and psychological pressure for staff and their households, leading to round 30 deaths by suicide and stress-related points, Lee stated.
“Many have lost their lives. People had to suffer for too long,” he stated.
He vividly remembers the police helicopters circling overhead, creating intense winds that ripped away staff’ raincoats.
Lee stated he felt he couldn’t hand over.
“We were seen as incompetent breadwinners and outdated labour activists who had lost their minds,” he stated. “Police kept beating us even after we fell unconscious — this happened at our workplace, and it was broadcast for so many to see.”
Lee stated he had been moved by scenes within the first season of “Squid Game” the place Gi-hun struggles to not betray his fellow rivals.
But he wished the present had spurred real-life change for staff in a rustic marked by financial inequality, tense industrial relations and deeply polarized politics.
“Despite being widely discussed and consumed, it is disappointing that we have not channelled these conversations into more beneficial outcomes,” he stated
The success of “Squid Game” in 2021 left him feeling “empty and frustrated”.
“At the time, it felt like the story of the Ssangyong workers had been reduced to a commodity in the series,” Lee informed AFP.
“Squid Game”, the streaming platform’s most-watched collection of all time, is seen as embodying the nation’s rise to a world cultural powerhouse, a part of the “Korean wave” alongside the Oscar-winning “Parasite” and Ok-pop stars reminiscent of BTS.
But its second season comes because the Asian democracy finds itself embroiled in a few of its worst political turmoil in many years, triggered by conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol’s failed bid to impose martial legislation this month.
Yoon has since been impeached and suspended from duties pending a ruling by the Constitutional Court.
That declaration of martial legislation risked sending the Korean wave “into the abyss”, round 3,000 folks within the movie trade, together with “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho, stated in a letter following Yoon’s stunning choice.
Vladimir Tikhonov, a Korean research professor on the University of Oslo, informed AFP that a few of South Korea’s most profitable cultural merchandise spotlight state and capitalist violence.
“It is a noteworthy and interesting phenomenon — we still live in the shadow of state violence, and this state violence is a recurrent theme in highly successful cultural products.”
© 2024 AFP