Squid Game and the Paradox of Capitalist Culture Industry: From Class Allegory to the Capitalized Carnival of Suffering Aesthetics

Since its global breakout in 2021, the Korean drama Squid Game has been widely interpreted as a profound metaphor for inequality and class rigidity in capitalist society. Through its extreme “survival game”, the series constructs a highly symbolic microcosm of capitalism, presenting the structural oppression faced by the poor through visual violence and psychological dilemmas. However, as a cultural product led by Netflix and aimed at a global market, the series itself is inevitably embedded in the operational logic of the capitalist culture industry. Its critical content is gradually alienated into a spectacle of mass entertainment in the process of commodification. This paper analyzes how Squid Game creates a tension between anti-capitalist expression and absorption by capitalist logic from four dimensions: political allegory structure, cultural industry mechanism, the logic of suffering aesthetics, and the cultural paradox of global dissemination. This paper argues that the success of Squid Game precisely exposes the boundary dilemma of contemporary cultural critique: even the most intense discourse of resistance may be tamed, packaged, and resold within the global capitalist system. Therefore, it is imperative for future cultural creators and critics to explore narrative paths with greater agency and critical tension to break the cyclical logic in which “anti-capitalism becomes a commodity”.