Squid Game’s Arenas: Maze, Labyrinth, and the Violent Structures of Capitalism

Squid Game as a series moves beyond the binary of utopia and dystopia in depicting its labyrinthine journey into the capitalist underworld. Viewers are confronted by these structures of suffering, toil, and inextricability, with death at its center. The episodes attest to the human fascination with mazes, labyrinths, theaters, sacrifice, and arenas both ancient and modern, where bloodletting and violence are performed in structures of confinement. The bloody action takes place on an island in an arena that has a maze; it is a structure built for the same purpose as the Labyrinth of Crete and is a slaughterhouse that hides illicit desires. The arena on the island is an attempt to contain the idea that capitalism produces utopia, because all have, according to the game runners, “equality, and opportunity, without discrimination.” The arena is an amplifier revealing the careless sacrifices of human bodies in neoliberal and consumer capitalism.