Why Do The Characters onSquid GameWear Masks?
Squid Game is obviously illegal, so the people running it wear masks to simply protect their anonymity and avoid legal consequences to their actions. They do not want the general public to know who they are, nor do they want the contestants to know, in case they somehow win, escape, or otherwise come into a position where they are able to tell the outside world about Squid Game and the identities of the people who are running it.
However, there is also a psychological aspect as to why the people runningSquid Gamewear masks, and why it is against the rules for them to ever remove their masks. The anonymity of the “bad guys” in Squid Game adds to their eeriness—the contestants do not know who is coming up with these twisted versions of children’s games, or who is willing to pay this huge sum of money just to watch a bunch of desperate people die. Not knowing who these people are or what their motivations are makes their actions scarier. The Front Man seems to realize this—he tells a worker not to remove his mask in front of the contestants, because “once they know who you are, you lose everything.”
The psychology behind the masks does not only affect the contestants, it also affects the workers, the Front Man, and the VIPs. The workers are required to put their masks and uniforms on each morning before stepping out of their individual bedrooms, so that they remain anonymous even to the other workers. It is thus more difficult for the workers to form individual relationships with each other, or to figure out who they can trust and who they can’t. An environment is created where the workers feel completely alone and must police their own behavior because they never know who someone else is or what they believe.
Worker Masks
Although Squid Game is run by a small group of elite individuals, a large group of workers was needed in order to help the games run smoothly. These workers arenotpart of an elite class, but work for the owners ofSquid Gamein exchange for money. It is implied that they do not get paid that much money, because some of them attempt to break rules in order to get extra money.
There are three different types of worker masks, but they are all easily recognizable as worker masks. The workers all wear the same uniform: a red jumpsuit with a hood, and a black mask covering their entire face, with a white shape on the top half of it. Each worker mask either has a triangle, a square, or a circle. Beyond this difference in shape, their uniforms are the same. This creates a sense of cohesion between the workers, making them seem like one conforming body rather than a group of diverse individuals. Clothed from head to toe, their entire bodies and faces are covered, so that nothing can mark them as an individual or even as a human. The workers are required to keep their masks on at all times, and the Front Man even warns that “once they know who you are, it’s all over.”
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The circles, squares, and triangles on worker masks are drawn in simple, crisp white lines, and they look like the icons on video game controllers. This creates a visual association between the workers and children’s games, further taking away their individual identity and making them instead part of the larger scene of the games.
Although it might seem like the shapes on the worker’s masks are random, since all workers are clearly ranked “lower” than the Front Man and the VIPs, the three different shapes actually represent three different, ranked categories of workers.
The workers with a circle on their masks are the “lowest” ranked. They are responsible for completing basic but necessary tasks on the island, such as cleaning, serving food to contestants, mopping up blood, removing corpses from the game areas, and incinerating the bodies of dead contestants. The circle workers do not even speak unless they are spoken to first by a superior.
The workers with a triangle on their mask are the second level of workers. They enforce the rules of each game, lead the group from one area to another, “eliminate” (shoot) players when they lose a game, and take care of general crowd control whenever something gets out of hand. Unlike the circle workers, the triangle workers are at least “above” the contestants, because they are able to give orders to the contestants or even kill them on the spot. In terms of class, the triangles are similar to a police officer or the manager of a chain store: they enforce certain rules, but they do not really get to make any rules and do not have enough power as an individual to really change the situation.
The highest level of workers are those with a square on their mask. They essentially supervise the triangles and circles, and can give orders to them. The square workers communicate directly with the Front Man to receive directions from him. Also, they can watch the video that is being recorded on the island. The square workers are above the contestants, the circle workers, and the triangle workers, but they are still ultimately workers.
The masks, created presumably by the host, the Front Man, or others similar to them, actually backfire in one instance, when a police officer sneaks onto the island and disguises himself as a worker without anyone realizing. Although it may have been difficult for him to get to the island, it was easy for him to blend in, undetected, for a while once he got there. He first disguised himself as a circle, but later switched to a square when he took the mask off a dead worker’s body. Presumably, he took this opportunity to switch masks because the square mask would have afforded him slightly more privileges as a worker. Of course, the Front Man and his workers easily overpowered the police officer once they saw his face without his mask on.
Front Man Mask
The Front Man wears an entirely different type of mask from the hoard of workers that obey him. Throughout much of the season, it seems as if the Front Man is running the show. However, it is clear that he is putting on the showforthe VIPs, even if he has power over both the workers and the contestants. In reality, though, the Front Man also answers to the evasive “host,” whose true identity remains a mystery until the season finale.
Since he is essentially second-in-command, it makes sense that the Front Man would have a special mask. His mask is black and angular, and when he wears it, his face looks like a robotic character from a video game. There are no white shapes on his mask, distinguishing him from a worker. The Front Man also wears black, not a red uniform like the workers. Although he is visually distinguished from the workers, the Front Man still keeps his real identity secret from the contestants by wearing a full uniform and mask.
The VIPs are wealthy men who come to watchSquid Game. The VIPs watch the games in real time, but they watch from a screen in a separate, fancy room, where they are simultaneously entertained with alcohol, food, and servants. They chat with each other (in English, unlike the rest of the characters) about what is happening in the games, and they can even make requests to the Front Man to alter the games in certain ways (like to turn the lights off to make a game harder). Because they are VIPS, their masks are different—fancier and more expensive-looking than everyone else’s. Each VIP wears a golden mask with a different animal’s face on it: a deer, a tiger, a lion, a bear, and a bull. Of course, the gold color likely symbolizes the wealth of the VIPs. Their masks are also angular like the Front Man’s, but the VIP masks are the only ones that seem to have holes for their eyes to see through. Presumably, the workers and the Front Man can still somehow see out of their masks, but there are no visible eye holes, so their faces are completely covered. It seems the VIPs have eye holes because they are there to watch. In film theory, the person who is looking (the possessor of “the gaze”) has power over the person who is being looked at. The VIPs have power over the contestants because they are watching, and because they are betting on the outcome of the games.
There may or may not be symbolic meanings behind the specific animals depicted on the VIP masks. The deer symbolizes the divine, so the person wearing the deer mask might be a religious leader. The tiger represents power, so the person wearing a tiger mask might be a politician. The bull symbolizes wealth, so he might be in banking or finance. There is a myth where Korean people descend from a bear-woman, so the person in a bear mask might be related to royalty or some important national figure. However, these are just guesses as to which lucrative careers fit into which animal’s general symbolism.
Like the workers and the Front Man, the VIPs keep their “real” identity a secret. However, the VIPs are not made anonymous through their masks, like the workers are. Rather, the VIPs are set apart from each other through their masks, since each one is completely unique. In a sense, the VIPs and the Front Man still have individual identities when they’re masked, even though we can’t see their “real” faces or know all of their real names. In the twisted world of Squid Game, identity seems to be a privilege that is not afforded to everyone. A clear class division is drawn between the workers and the Front Man/VIPs.
Unmasked Characters
The contestants onSquid Gamedo not wear masks, although other measures are taken to partially diminish their identities. The contestants all wear the same uniform as each other, the only difference being the number that is printed on the uniform. To further take away their identities, the workers only ever refer to the contestants by their numbers, not their names. Although the contestants sometimes call each other by name, they do not have names in Squid Game.
Although the contestants are robbed of some aspects of their identity, they still do not wear masks. This makes the contestants vulnerable to some degree—other people can see exactly who they are and will not get them confused with someone else.
In one scene, one of the VIPs takes a worker (actually the cop posing as a worker) into a private room because he is planning to sexually assault the worker. As part of this power play, the VIP demands that the cop-in-disguise remove his mask and show his face. Another privilege inSquid Game, then, is choosing when to reveal your own true identity and when to conceal it, and being able to make this choice for others who are “below” you.
Although masks are meant to conceal the true identity of the person underneath, the character with the best disguise was not even wearing a mask. Player 001 (Oh Il-Nam, the old man) is actually the host of Squid Game, but he hides in plain sight as a contestant. Nobody suspects that he is the host or that he is anything other than a contestant, because he is dressed like a contestant and behaves like one. As the only elderly participant, he is recognizably different from the rest of the contestants, and nobody seems to feel threatened by him. The other contestants do not suspect that Player 001 will kill them in their sleep, nor do they worry that he will be very good at any of the games, because they perceive him as frail, slow, and weak. Also, at the end of the show, it makes sense that if one of the players was going to secretly be the host, they would be player number 001, but at the time that the games were occurring, none of the contestants suspected anything about Oh Il-Nam based on his number; they apparently just assumed that one person would have to be 001, so there was nothing suspicious about it.
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