No-One's Talking About The Best Part Of Squid Game
Telephiles, listen up. There’s change afoot in the way that television shows are not only being commissioned, written and made, but also how we, television’s disciples, consume said shows. Gone are the days of ‘second screening’ (the art that large swathes of the population have fine-tuned of scrolling/tapping/swiping on any given digital device while a TV show blasts in the background), and in their place is quite the opposite; intense singular screening sessions, which are the result of TV shows that require the most attuned of our attention. A case in point is hit thriller series Squid Game, which, for monolingual western audiences, can only be watched — nay understood — by reading subtitles. Forget putting your phone down, this is a TV show so rapturously intense that it requires phones not only be put away, but also turned off and forgotten about for the entirety of its airing.
Indeed, modern life has made the very minutiae of existing so impossible to do without our attention being tugged and tweaked by technology that watching TV, once an escape, is now just a means of filling rooms with noise. The rise of ‘background TV’, and the auditory stimulation it provides, is largely seen as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, which rendered many of us alone with our work, housemates and — God forbid — our own thoughts. Rather than the ‘appointment viewing’ of yesteryear - which occurred in the age of terrestrial TV when we’d congregate to watch the airing of TV shows - in the streaming era, TV in many cases has been relegated to the visual equivalent of elevator music. In one of his papers, Dr. Chun Shah, whose work focusses on new media and communication theory, found that ‘despite the myriad shows Netflix pumps out — even going so far as to use algorithms to determine what its audiences want — the truth is, sometimes what audiences want is merely background noise. Many participants indicated they used Netflix to fill the silence… and keep them company.’
FIND OUT MORE ON ELLE COLLECTIVE
It’s precisely this return to ‘appointment viewing’ that Squid Game — and its subtitled foreign language predecessors — has precipitated. Yes, all seven episodes of the second season, which was released on Boxing Day, can be binge-watched, but they can’t be watched, let alone enjoyed, without full attention being employed. Miss just a few seconds of watching (and reading) Squid Game, and you may well find yourself entirely lost in translation. There’s a beauty in Squid Game’s subtitles and the lost era of TV watching it harks back to. While there’s very little that’s relaxing, cathartic or particularly enjoyable about the second season of the hit show, there is something nice about indulging in watching something that requires every last scrap of your attention in order to stay afloat of its plot. The figures don’t lie either: according to Netflix, in 2023, 40% of its global users have subtitles on all the time, while 80% use them at least once a month – figures that far outstrip the number of viewers who may need captioning because of hearing impairment.
That’s not to say that subtitles have come without their challenges. Within the first week of Squid Game’s season one's release in 2021, Korean speakers flocked to social media to bemoan Netflix’s 'bad' translations of the dialogue into English, accusing the streaming service of sterilising the anti-capitalist messaging of the show. One of the most-liked videos on TikTok that discusses the purportedly lazy translations has, at the time of writing, been liked just shy of 3 million times. Youngmi Mayer, the podcaster who made that TikTok, had also tweeted at the time of Squid Game's debut saying that 'if you don’t understand Korean, you didn’t really watch the same show.'
There's also the chasm between the commercial successes of subtitled shows and films, and their caption-free counterparts. Bong Joon Ho, the esteemed Korean director of Parasite, famously referred to the ‘one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles’ while accepting the Best Foreign Language gong for his film at the Golden Globes in 2020. Despite only initially being screened at three cinemas in America upon its release, Parasite, which had subtitles for western audiences, eventually won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay and grossed more than $200 million (£160 million) at the box office.
Despite the challenges, both literal and subliminal, of foreign language TV shows and films, there's no denying that Squid Game, which has been renewed for a third and final season, is a compelling watch. It might not be a pain-free or relaxing watch, but it's a TV show that enraptures and absorbs, largely by virtue of western audiences having to engage more vociferously with reading subtitles. Yet any watch that requires we tuck our adopted digital limbs away for our viewing pleasure is a must-see in our book.
ELLE Collective is a new community of fashion, beauty and culture lovers. For access to exclusive content, events, inspiring advice from our Editors and industry experts, as well the opportunity to meet designers, thought-leaders and stylists, become a member today HERE.
You Might Also Like
