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A manufacturing facility 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 folks compete in lethal variations of conventional youngsters’s video games for an enormous money prize. (Additionally learn: Squid Sport creator Hwang Dong-hyuk likens present’s violent sport to US election, S2 will ask ‘is majority at all times proper?’)
However whereas the present itself is a piece of fiction, Hwang Dong-hyuk, its director and author, has mentioned the experiences of the principle character Gi-hun, a laid-off employee, have been impressed by the violent Ssangyong strikes in 2009.
“I needed to point out that any extraordinary middle-class individual on this planet we reside in as we speak can fall to the underside of the financial ladder in a single day,” he has mentioned.
In Could 2009, Ssangyong, a struggling automotive big taken over by a consortium of banks and personal buyers, 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 led to clashes between strikers armed with slingshots and metal pipes and riot police wielding rubber bullets and tasers. Many union members have been severely overwhelmed, and a few have 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 facility’s chimneys to protest a sentence in favour of Ssangyong towards the strikers.
He was equipped 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 Sport due to the trauma they endured, Lee informed AFP.
The repercussions of the strike, compounded by protracted authorized battles, brought about important monetary and psychological pressure for staff 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 staff’ raincoats. Lee mentioned he felt he couldn’t hand over.
“We have been seen as incompetent breadwinners and outdated labour activists who had misplaced their minds,” he mentioned. “Police saved beating us even after we fell unconscious — this occurred at our office, and it was broadcast for therefore 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 opponents.
However he wished the present had spurred real-life change for staff 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 we’ve not channelled these conversations into extra useful outcomes,” he mentioned.
‘Shadow of state violence’
The success of Squid Sport in 2021 left him feeling “empty and annoyed”. “On the time, it felt just like the story of the Ssangyong staff had been lowered to a commodity within the collection,” Lee informed AFP.
Squid Sport, the streaming platform’s most-watched collection of all time, is seen as embodying the nation’s rise to a worldwide cultural powerhouse, a part of the Korean wave alongside the Oscar-winning Parasite and Okay-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 folks within the movie business, together with “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho, mentioned in a letter following Yoon’s surprising resolution.
Vladimir Tikhonov, a Korean research professor on the College of Oslo, informed AFP that a few of South Korea’s most profitable cultural merchandise spotlight state and capitalist violence.
“It’s a noteworthy and attention-grabbing phenomenon — we nonetheless reside within the shadow of state violence, and this state violence is a recurrent theme in extremely profitable cultural merchandise.”
