r/netflix – [OC] Squid Game: List of Stanley Kubrick references

Below is my article on the subject. Please refer to the published text for the neccesary images, via this link:

https://battleroyalewithcheese.com/2021/10/squid-game-stanley-kubrick-references-and-where-to-find-them/

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As a Kubrick enthusiast, it’s a pleasure to discern the influences of Stanley’s work on Korean director Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Netflix hit Squid Game.

In episode one we are introduced to the environment of the rebuilt island. The militarized personnel are all placed in front of a landscape of retro-style computer screens for Stasi-like surveillance. The beauty of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in E flat major makes for a perverse contrast to the scene at hand. A while later, the unfortunate players of the game find themselves waking up inside of the island’s sleeping hall. The evil atmosphere permeating these set designs, coupled with the classical music, just oozes of the polished retro-futurism and suppressed violence of Kubrick’s The Clockwork Orange. In which Alex DeLarge and his ‘droogs’ kicks the shit out of rival gangs to classical music.

In terms of specific references to Kubrick, there is the in-film use of Strauss’ The Blue Danube, famously used as soundtrack during space travel in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Because, as the players in Squid Game are entering through some kind of automated registration process, during which Strauss’ famous waltz is playing, the scene works as a bold visual allusion to the passport control system at the Space Station 5 in Kubrick’s film.

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Further on in the series there are strong vibes of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the director’s last masterpiece. In both films there are members of a “society elite” being masked as they attend a secret leisure event. One of the masked “VIP’s” in Squid Game asks the police infiltrator, hiding as pantry man, to remove his mask. In Eyes Wide Shut, the masked leader at the secret ball asks Tom Cruise’s character, an infiltrator at the event, to do the same.

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The VIP takes the cop infiltrator to an adjacent room. The walls are covered with paintings of some kind of stylized bizarre erotica. For some, this might be too vague an example as to be called an outright nod to The Clockwork Orange; but it is, for sure, though, a fine example of a deliberate aesthetic influence. There is a scene, among many actually, in Kubrick’s film in which the walls are covered with several paintings, the stylized erotica being in the same vein as the images seen in the room in Squid Game.

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This might be the appropriate moment to quote The Guardian’s interview of the actors playing the “VIP’s”, in which those actors confront bad reviews by putting forth Hwang Dong-hyuk’s admiration for Kubrick. “By the way, the show’s creator? He’s a Kubrick freak. Listen to the music he’s playing when we’re in the big scene. It’s from 2001. So it was a stylised performance predicated on, I believe, the director’s kinship [with Kubrick].” (The Guardian, ‘They didn’t just pick us up off the street!’ Meet the globally derided Squid Game VIPs, 19 Oct 2021.)

And finally. The three surviving players in Squid Game are being given a final dinner (in episode eight), before the final game. As has been noted elsewhere (which means: Reddit), this dinner scene is eerily reminiscent of the barren dinner evening during the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The soundtrack? Again, as during several occasions throughout the series, it is Strauss’ The Blue Danube, being played in-film.

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Now, this is the way we want our Kubrick references. They’re supposed to be subtle, giving added flavour to an operation already smooth. (If you ask me, references to the films of Stanley Kubrick should be like this, and favourably not like a cake thrown in your face. As those in Spielberg’s Ready Player One are. But that, of course, is another story.)