Seoul, South Korea:
A manufacturing unit changed into 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 Sport”, a dystopian imaginative and prescient of South Korea the place determined individuals compete in lethal variations of conventional youngsters’s video games for an enormous money prize.
However whereas the present itself is a piece of fiction, Hwang Dong-hyuk, its director and author, has mentioned the experiences of the primary character Gi-hun, a laid-off employee, had been impressed by the violent Ssangyong strikes in 2009.
“I needed to indicate that any odd middle-class individual on the earth we reside in at this time can fall to the underside of the financial ladder in a single day,” he has mentioned.
In Might 2009, Ssangyong, a struggling automobile large taken over by a consortium of banks and personal traders, introduced it was shedding greater than 2,600 individuals, or practically 40 % of its workforce.
That was the start of an occupation of the manufacturing unit and a 77-day strike that led to clashes between strikers armed with slingshots and metal pipes and riot police wielding rubber bullets and tasers.
Many union members had been severely crushed and a few had been jailed.
‘Many misplaced their lives’
The battle didn’t finish there.
5 years later, union chief Lee Chang-kun held a sit-in for 100 days on high of one of many manufacturing unit’s chimneys to protest a sentence in favour of Ssangyong in opposition to the strikers.
He was equipped with meals from a basket hooked up 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 Sport” due to the trauma they endured, Lee advised AFP.
The repercussions of the strike, compounded by protracted authorized battles, prompted important monetary and psychological pressure for employees and their households, leading to round 30 deaths by suicide and stress-related points, Lee mentioned.
“Many have misplaced their lives. Individuals needed to endure for too lengthy,” he mentioned.
He vividly remembers the police helicopters circling overhead, creating intense winds that ripped away employees’ raincoats.
Lee mentioned he felt he couldn’t hand over.
“We had been seen as incompetent breadwinners and outdated labour activists who had misplaced their minds,” he mentioned.
“Police stored beating us even after we fell unconscious — this occurred at our office, and it was broadcast for thus many to see.”
Lee mentioned he had been moved by scenes within the first season of “Squid Sport” the place Gi-hun struggles to not betray his fellow rivals.
However he wished the present had spurred real-life change for employees in a rustic marked by financial inequality, tense industrial relations and deeply polarised politics.
“Regardless of being extensively mentioned and consumed, it’s disappointing that now we have not channelled these conversations into extra helpful outcomes,” he mentioned.
‘Shadow of state violence’
The success of “Squid Sport” in 2021 left him feeling “empty and pissed off”.
“On the time, it felt just like the story of the Ssangyong employees had been lowered to a commodity within the sequence,” Lee advised AFP.
“Squid Sport”, the streaming platform’s most-watched sequence 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 corresponding to BTS.
However 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 regulation this month.
Yoon has since been impeached and suspended from duties pending a ruling by the Constitutional Court docket.
That declaration of martial regulation risked sending the Korean wave “into the abyss”, round 3,000 individuals within the movie trade, together with “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho, mentioned in a letter following Yoon’s surprising determination.
Vladimir Tikhonov, a Korean research professor on the College of Oslo, advised AFP that a few of South Korea’s most profitable cultural merchandise spotlight state and capitalist violence.
“It’s a noteworthy and fascinating phenomenon — we nonetheless reside within the shadow of state violence, and this state violence is a recurrent theme in extremely profitable cultural merchandise.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
