So, you just finished binge-watching Squid Game, the international smash hit written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk that has become the most popular show in the history of Netflix, and have been left with one burning question: why did the show, in Episode 2, go out of its way to highlight that one book sitting on that one desk?
The book emphasized by the subtitles is called Theory of Desire and its author’s name is Jacques Lacan. The text is sitting next to some other books and one of them, if you look at the group closely, is Lacan’s Seminar XI (even if you can’t read Korean,
you can still know it’s Seminar XI due to the “11” on the side of the book and the image from Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, which Lacan discusses in Seminar XI). Chances are you have never heard of Lacan, but there’s good reason to learn about him.
This blog post will introduce the reader to Lacan’s theory of desire and also explain why Squid Game went out of its way to make an explicit reference to his work. I’ll say up front that gaining even an introductory familiarity with Lacan’s concept of desire will require a conceptual journey that is both long and difficult, but I think it is an incredibly rewarding one.
This post will be divided into two parts. The first part will be an introduction to Lacanian desire and the second will be a Lacanian interpretation of the show itself (if you already have a working knowledge of Lacanian theory, then you might want to skip the lengthy introduction and jump ahead to the analysis of Squid Game).
There are many thematic and conceptual connections to be made between Squid Game and Lacanian psychoanalysis, but I’m not going to write an incredibly detailed interpretation of the show right now. Instead,
I want to merely provide an elementary understanding of how they both can be used to explain one another. To undertake this task, I will be presupposing that the reader has watched all nine episodes of the show and I also will be discussing spoilers, so spoiler alert!
