ABSTRACT
Streaming services such as Netflix are constantly looking for new content. Using a local-to-global framework, Netflix finds content producers around the world and tries to market their products to a global market. Squid Game is an example of this strategy. Produced in and by South Koreans, Squid Game quickly became the most popular Netflix television series, surpassing Bridgerton. In order to reach this global success, this chapter suggests that Orientalism is not simply the use of the East in Western cultural products to validate and reinscribe Western cultural superiority. Instead, the reception of non-Western cultural products can play into Orientalist ideologies as part of their appeal to a more global audience. In part, many of the local meanings in the television series are lost to a global audience, such as the North Korean accent of one of the characters and the significance of the children’s games. The local gets overrun by the global vision of a dystopian society with incredible income inequality that allows the global elites to use the South Koreans as players in a deadly “game” for their entertainment.
