Cultural Specificity, Hybridity, and Transnationality in Squid Game

Netflix's original series Squid Game emerged as one of the most discussed TV series in 2021, generating 1.65 billion hours of viewing in 28 days after its release on September 17 while becoming the number one streaming show around the world.1 After the global success of Squid Game, many meme videos circulated on the Internet, legitimating the transnational appeal of the South Korean (hereafter Korean) TV series. For example, Saturday Night Live did a comedy sketch featuring Rami Malek and Pete Davidson with selective scenes from the series, which generated more than thirteen million views on YouTube. What is particularly striking about this video is not its use of satire and parody but its attempt to recreate the series as a Western with cowboys and country music. Additionally, the substitution of Korean characters with primarily white actors prompts us to consider whether the series with white characters would have enjoyed the same success in the global media market.

Many TV critics and scholars have attributed the global success of Squid Game to its universal themes, especially the show's critique of growing social class disparities stemming from neoliberal capitalism in Korean society. For instance, Ramon Pacheco Pardo of Fortune writes, "[T]he success of South Korean culture has another crucial component: its focus on universal topics."2 Similarly, Liam Hess of Vogue in France writes, "It's not just the high-octane excitement that has made Squid Game such an international sensation but the universal themes it explores — specifically its implicit critique of capitalism and exploration of class anxiety."3And in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Minyoung Kim, Vice President of Content for Asia Pacific at Netflix, in explaining the global success of Squid Game, states, "But as a creative executive, I think the essence of the show is its commentary on social injustice — class divisions and financial inequality, or even gender-related issues."4

While claims of universality focus on class inequality as an outgrowth of neoliberal capitalism (also apparent in the Oscar-winning Korean film Parasite (2019)by Bong Joon-ho), I want to shift the focus to the question of cultural specificity in Squid Game and its ramifications in the discussion of global television flows. Many Western audiences have found non-Western media, particularly Asian films and TV programs, appealing because of the audience's unfamiliarity in terms of their languages, actors, and cultures, further rooted in their otherness and exoticism, restricting their reach to an esoteric audience of cinephiles and fans. However, Netflix's rise as a global streaming platform complicates theories of media and cultural imperialism as it contributes to the counterflow of media from different national markets. Additionally, Netflix's aim to reach different national media markets with content in multiple languages has unintentionally transformed its subscribers with more global and cultural tastes into a version of cosmopolitan and globalized subjects whose consumption of culturally specific programs speaks to their illusory investment in progressiveness and diversity.

Cultural specificity points to the messiness of hybridity as a theoretical concept while also offering representations of national culture. In the case of Squid Game, South Korea emerges in its cultural specificity, which adds to the show's credibility for consumers. Yet, the desire for cultural specificity contributes to the othering of foreign media texts from both global (especially white) and local audiences. The concept of cultural specificity also speaks to Edward Said's seminal work on Orientalism, in which the West valorizes the primitive through the lens of specificity in order to assert its power over other cultures as it continues to feminize, exoticize, and stigmatize them.

Moreover, in the digital platform era, as Jun Okada notes, the technology of streaming platforms allows cinephilia "to be born as a globally networked phenomenon based on diversity and not as much on exclusivity."5 As a result, she argues, "the death of Eurocentric, white, geopolitically limited cinephilia in the 1990s allowed 'other' kinds of cinephilia to be born."6 Accordingly, the proliferation of streaming platforms, including Netflix, allows the emergence of cosmopolitan — beyond local and domestic — audiences, who consider culturally specific television programs more authentic and their consumption as expressive of their progressive views and investments in diversity, tendencies that do not actually lead to the demise of Eurocentrism.

Aside from the ongoing transformation of the global audience, to understand why certain media texts transcend national borders scholars have proposed concepts such as cultural proximity, transcultural affinity, and transnational proximity to examine global media circulation.7 The concept of cultural proximity has often been discussed to explore why audiences prefer one media text over another based on linguistic and cultural affinities. Most recently, Dal Yong Jin proposed a new theoretical concept of "transnational proximity" to examine the global success of Korean popular culture, such as Squid Game, BTS, and Parasite. He defines transnational proximity as "the universal uniqueness that people, in particular global youth, easily identify with in the early twenty-first century."8 Despite the polemics around the notion of universality in terms of what constitutes it and how it is often defined through the West, Jin argues that Korean popular culture relies on "both local authenticity and global familiarity as cultural content representing Koreanness," which he further points out is not necessarily the same as hybridity.9 In other words, while hybridity disguises specific Korean characteristics, new forms of Korean popular culture capitalize on Koreanness with specific universal traits to appeal to the global audience.10

Despite the convolution of and porous boundaries between cultural specificity, cultural authenticity, and hybridity, cultural specificity nevertheless enables us to discuss the politics of representation and reception without falling into cultural essentialism. Squid Game illustrates how cultural specificity and hybridity interact with one another, particularly in revealing how cultural specificity is critical to the interplay of cultural and representational politics in global media and popular culture. When Minyoung Kim was asked about the creative decisions that came down to a debate between cultural authenticity and global accessibility, she explained, "We've always believed that the most locally authentic shows will travel best, so having a show that's about really authentic Korean games and characters become really big not only in Korea but also globally — it's such an exciting moment for us."11

Kim's statement underscores the marketing ploy of cultural specificity as progressive, inflected with an ethos of diversity while failing to understand how it could also reproduce cultural othering. Squid Game capitalizes on culturally specific Korean childhood games, such as dalgona, mugunhwa khoci pieot seumnida, and ojingeo, aiming to reclaim the nostalgic past of local Korean viewers, which in fact can also produce an othering of Korean culture from a global (non-Korean) audience. Therefore, the line between cultural specificity and cultural othering becomes blurry as they are in constant tension. Both cultural specificity and cultural othering capitalize on the aestheticization of differences depending on the audience's interpretative and cultural standpoint. In other words, cultural specificity, as in the case of Squid Game, can invoke nostalgic sentiments that other its own history: the past, in the form of childhood games, becomes constructed as the Other, especially for Koreans who might have never played the games while simultaneously facilitating the global fetishization of its culture. While non-Korean audiences are attracted to the Korean characteristics defined as cultural specificity, it could potentially engender a fetishization and exoticization of Korea in which cultural otherness produces symbolic markers of the Korean nation.

In other words, the unfamiliar childhood games rooted in specific cultural traditions could also engender a foreign, alien, and exotic reading of the text, reinforcing the otherness of the text disguised under cultural specificity. Also, as Young A. Jung notes in her piece, cultural specificity becomes an essential element that parody artists (e.g., Dtay Known) capitalize on when they produce their videos to articulate their own parodic cultural specificity. For example, in an article published in Teen Vogue, the author Jae-Ha Kim points out how Squid Game "can also be viewed as a microcosm of South Korea and its complicated history."12 This allegorical reading of the text also suggests that a desire for cultural specificity could manifest itself as another form of othering, a process quite literally embedded in the term allegory (allos = other). The search and desire for cultural specificity in Squid Game resonate with Aijaz Ahmad's incisive critique of reading Third World literary texts as allegories of the nation and how this process reifies non-Western cultural production as the Other.13 Similarly, a tweet from Nodutdol, a diasporic online Korean community, states,

Here, I am not dismissing the TV series' commentary on neoliberal capitalism but arguing how this tendency can further reveal how the desire for cultural specificity can itself become another iteration of othering. For instance, Yin Yuan argues that the popularity of Squid Game in North America "can be attributed to a taste for exoticized sameness" in which "its conspicuously Korean signifiers" commodify Koreaness.15 Therefore, cultural specificity, both as a manifestation of otherness and diversity under the façade of Koreanness, is marked as a peculiar feature of the series. Interestingly, Squid Game also features the character of Ali Abdul (Anupam Tripathi), a migrant worker from Pakistan who is a victim of both precarious labor conditions and exploitation by his Korean employer. Ali adds specificity to the particular multicultural makeup of Korea, as well as global migration flows, highlighting how Netflix defines diversity not only as a discrete outcome in terms of representation and demography but also internationalization of content.16 For instance, Ted Sarandos, Chief Executive Officer at Netflix, stated at the 2018 UBS Annual Global Media and Communications Conference held in New York, "we're not trying to make more Hollywood content for the world, we're trying to make content from anywhere in the world to the rest of the world."17 Sarandos's statement suggests how international diversity is central to Netflix in addition to race, ethnicity, and gender.

International diversity further suggests the significance of cultural specificity as a marker of distinction, given that media texts are considered inherently hybrid in terms of both production and consumption. Thus, cultural specificity and hybridity are not only closely interconnected but also speak to questions of power informing the circulation and reception of non-Western media texts. Writers such as Christine Lehnen and Joshua Weiss, in their reviews of Squid Game, point out how the Korean series offers a new take on Battle Royale and Hunger Games. These accounts assume that Korean media appropriates  from Japan and the United States, attributing any cultural specificity to the hybridity that emerges from that appropriation.18 Rather than acknowledging the distinctive qualities of Squid Game, hegemonic cultures too often get positioned as the main points of reference from which the cultural specificity of Korean media is constructed, further underscoring how its transnational viability reveals a process of legitimization forged through neocolonial logics.

As Marwan Kraidy puts it, "Intentional hybridity is therefore primarily a communicative phenomenon. Its intentionality increases the possibility that possibility that it will become a process of othering, where identities are projected by powerful social agents onto others who are less powerful."19 Furthermore, if hybridity is a communicative process, the industry lore of cultural specificity circulated in press materials and journalistic accounts affirms the hybridity of Korean media texts in which institutional entities with greater power, in this case Netflix, not only define and ascribe cultural specificity in the form of Koreanness to Korean popular culture, but also ultimately contribute to Korean popular culture's othering. Hybridity, in other words, denies the agency of Korean creative laborers to define and avow what is culturally specific to their texts. In an in-depth interview with Hong Seok-Kyeong at Seoul National University, Hwang Dong-hyuk, Squid Game's creator, acknowledges the influence of Hollywood films, including Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984) and The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978), which further points to how we can read his work through the lens of hybridity.20 Rather than seeing hybridity as an offshoot of appropriation, we can see it, as , Nestor García Canclini puts it, as an effect of "impure genres." García Canclini writes, "The classic paradigms with which domination was explained are incapable of taking into account the dissemination of the centers, the multipolarity of social initiatives, the plurality of references — taken from diverse territories — with which artists, artisans, and the mass media assemble their works."21 García Canclini's theorization of hybridity illustrates how hybridity cannot be solely examined through the lens of domination in terms of power, but how it is interwoven in multiple ways, engendering what he characterizes as oblique power. Does Hwang drawing inspiration from Hollywood films immediately discredit the culturally specificity of Squid Game? Or does it justify the argument that cross-cultural encounters have always been inherent and pervasive?22 Hwang's statement illustrates how the discussion of cultural specificity that rests between the idea of Koreanness and the concept of hybridity operates within the strictures of Western cultural hegemony and what it defines as culturally specific for global audiences. The West continues to assert its power in legitimizing the cultural specificity of non-Western programs. I would also argue that this further expands to the issue of intellectual property rights in which Western platforms such as Netflix and Disney+ exert their power through the acquisition of intellectual property, thus transferring proprietorship and creativity from Korean to Western media entities as a form of neo-imperialism in the platform era. Perhaps the case of the recent hit Korean series Extraordinary Attorney Woo illustrates how Korean cultural producers can counter the hegemony of the West: when the CEO of the production studio Astory rejected Netflix's offer to produce the TV drama as an original series, it was importantly a refusal to cede the studio's intellectual property rights.

Returning to the SNL parody, Western engagements Squid Game often superficially acknowledge the TV series' global success recognizing it as culturally specific while simultaneously aiming to reclaim American hegemony through the creative interplay of hybridity. Markers of cultural specificity are made hybrid through the skit's signifiers of whiteness, specifically the uncritical use of the Western genre and country music. Moments like this point to the need for more theorization on the relationship between cultural specificity and localized hybridity that does not reify the binary of dominance and opposition or core and periphery. While cultural specificity considers the histories, experiences, and politics tied to a particular marker of national identity, the theorization of cultural specificity must dislocate the West as the main point of reference for both specificity and hybridity. Indeed, localized hybridity needs to be understood as a creative and dialectical process that emerges organically from specific translocal experiences that remain outside the boundaries of universalizing Western experiences, influences, and inspirations. What kinds of new subjectivities are engendered through the juxtaposition of creativity and cultural specificity as a communicative process? Localized hybridity that dispossesses the West must also consider the myriad tensions within a nation's culture, enabling different variations of hybridities that are an outgrowth of translocalism. More importantly, cultural specificity as translocal hybridity should not be subjected to the West's distortive desire for exoticization and stigmatization as national cultural producers should define it for themselves.

The concept of cultural specificity, with its implications of authenticity, certainly has its pitfalls, especially when used to discuss the politics of representation within global media flows. Thus, the theorization of cultural specificity must carefully consider the racial logics and power dynamics in the reception process, and how the facade of corporate diversity and progressiveness shapes the meaning of Korean characters, culture, and society. More importantly, cultural specificity not only moves beyond the dominant binaries that have long informed studies of race and global media but also prompts us to rethink questions of particularity, agency, and power.

---

Benjamin M. Han is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. His research focuses on global media and the cultural intersections between East Asia and Latin America.  

---

References