Oh Il-nam (Player 001): The old man who invented a deadly game because he was bored

In the sixth episode of Squid Game (Netflix, 2021), the players pair up for a game of marbles without knowing that only one of each pair will come out alive. Oh Il-nam, player 001, a frail old man with a brain tumor, teams up with Gi-hun, the protagonist, and seems to lose track of the game; Gi-hun takes advantage of his apparent dementia to cheat him out of his marbles. In the end Il-nam hands him the last one, calls him his gganbu, his trusted friend, and stays behind, counted as eliminated. He had known about the deception all along. In the final episode, on his deathbed, he tells Gi-hun why: he invented the game for some very rich clients who no longer enjoyed anything, and he signed up to play because watching from the stands was no longer enough. That confession turns the series into a case for cultural criminology, which studies crime as emotion, spectacle and consumption.

// The theoryCrime as emotion and as spectacle

In Seductions of Crime (1988), the sociologist Jack Katz argued that criminology forgot something obvious: crime produces intense emotions, and is sometimes committed for them. Stephen Lyng called the deliberate pursuit of extreme risk edgework. From these ideas, Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward and Jock Young developed cultural criminology, which studies crime as experience, image and commodity: violence turned into a spectacle that others consume, and the emotions sought in it when everyday life offers none.

// The subjectA kindly grandfather

For almost the whole series, Il-nam is the most endearing character: a forgetful old man who plays with delight, remembers his childhood and grows fond of Gi-hun. That tenderness was not entirely false, and that is the disturbing part. Il-nam truly enjoys the games of his childhood; what he does not care about is that, for him to enjoy them, hundreds of people must die.

The series plants clues that can only be read backwards. In the second episode, when the survivors vote on whether to go on, the 100-100 tie is broken by player 001, who votes to stop the games: the creator lets everyone go home, and he himself comes back, as if he would rather not die out there. In the fourth, during the fight in the dark dormitory, it is the cries of the old man perched on top of a tower of bunk beds that bring the beating to an end, and the lights come back on. And in the last, after the confession, he proposes one more bet: a drunk man lies in the snowy street, and Il-nam bets that no one will stop to help him before midnight. Someone stops. Il-nam dies at that moment, on Christmas Eve, without getting to see it. The man who turned other people’s despair into a show dies betting on everyone else’s indifference, and losing.

// The crackEmotion does not explain inequality

Cultural criminology explains well why Il-nam plays, but less well why the others agree to play. The 456 players are not looking for thrills: they are looking for a way out of impossible debts. Squid Game is above all an allegory of economic inequality, and that structural dimension takes a back seat if we look only at the creator’s emotion.

Moreover, the series is itself a spectacle of violence that millions consume with enthusiasm, like the fictional VIPs. Cultural criminology would point it out: the critique of the spectacle is part of the spectacle.