Hourly pay 100 times the minimum wage, but you must risk your life··· A labor expos in fantasy trappings, ‘Kkul Alba’ - 경향신문
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The protagonist Hyuk-jun (left, Lee Jae-wook) of the Netflix series <Sweet Gig> is driven to the brink of death multiple times while doing a referral side job that introduces Spider Workforce gigs paying more than 50 times the hourly wage. His younger sister Ji-yoon (Kim Min-ha) searches for him after losing contact while he is at work. Courtesy of Netflix
When people gain a big reward with little effort, it is commonly called a sweet gig. So the title <Sweet Gig> suggests an easy, well-paid part-time job. The eight-episode Netflix series <Sweet Gig> subverts that expectation twice. It features high-paying work that offers 50 or even 100 times the minimum hourly wage, yet the jobs are so perilous that you must be ready to risk your life. Although it wears the trappings of fantasy, with monsters and time running backward, it tells a story rooted in reality by exposing the hardship of labor and the injustices of the workplace.
The protagonist Hyuk-jun (Lee Jae-wook) is on the brink from the start. Saddled with 140 million won in debt due to a jeonse scam and more, he is about to throw himself from a Han River bridge when he spots a Spider Workforce sticker on the railing. In the convenience store stockroom he visits on the recommendation of the "boss" (Lee Hee-jun) he met at the office, there is a woman who seems part insect, and the coworker doing the shift with him suddenly turns into a giant rat monster. After sunrise, when Hyuk-jun complains, saying, "I almost died," the boss smiles and explains. When the boundary between the positive Yang world and the negative Yin world becomes unstable, beings from the other side intrude, and they counter them by deploying strong yang energy that can subdue them. That, he says, is "labor" - because there is no yang energy stronger than the struggle to make a living.
In the Netflix series <Sweet Gig>, Hyuk-jun (right, Lee Jae-wook) is late to an evening event at a university hospital department and even gets berated by professors over the phone. Courtesy of Netflix
Each episode unleashes bizarre entities that startle Hyuk-jun and viewers alike. They range from a clown and giant theme-park mascot to monsters shaped like rats or leeches, and even an officetel that shifts up, down, left, and right as if in the film <Cube>. As one can guess from its adults-only rating, the bloodletting is rampant. Though Hyuk-jun may lack ability, he has a fierce survival instinct, and he returns alive every time after brushing up against death. Despite the ordeals and risks, he keeps going back to the Spider Workforce because of the last words left by his "father" (Baek Hyun-jin), who disappeared after launching a business when Hyuk-jun was a child: "Just finish this one job well. That place is a sweet spot."
<Sweet Gig> summons reality from within fantasy. Because the clown scheduled to host a university hospital department dinner arrives late, a doctor hurls abuse at a pharmaceutical-company employee over the phone, and the company employee in turn snaps at Hyuk-jun and the clown. It is a textbook top-down pecking order. A text message arrives to a friend of Hyuk-jun who collapses while working at a logistics center that reads, "The company bears no responsibility whatsoever."
An episode also evokes the 1978 "Dong-il Textile" case, in which female workers were suppressed by having excrement dumped on them. Episode 7 traces the past of Yeon-ju (Go Min-si), a woman worker at Gyeongil Textile in the 1970s. Yeon-ju hides inside a cabinet in an office during a labor dispute, falls into the other world, and returns to reality 40 years later. In scenes from Yeon-ju's past, people appear dumping filth on the workers.
In the Netflix series <Sweet Gig>, Hyuk-jun (left, Lee Jae-wook) even gets into a physical fight with the "boss" (Lee Hee-jun) who introduced him to dangerous part-time work. Courtesy of Netflix
The dialogue is sharp as well. When Hyuk-jun recounts meeting ghosts and monsters at work, his sister Ji-yoon (Kim Min-ha) retorts, "Are you afraid of ghosts? What is scary is becoming destitute." A construction-site foreman (Go Chang-seok) says that a building "only rises when you grind people into it." In the final, eighth episode, while fighting the boss, Hyuk-jun shouts, "Do you know how many of the temps you sent have died? Everyone did it because they wanted to live."
<Sweet Gig> weaves real labor issues into the grammar of the fantasy genre and is gaining popularity. It is competing for the top spot in viewing time among domestic Netflix series with <Doctor X> and <100 Days of Lies>, and it ranked fourth among Netflix non-English shows for October 26 to November 1.
Drama critic Yun Seok-jin, a professor at Chungnam National University, said, "By using realistic material, it makes viewers regard the situations in the drama as their own," adding, "By connecting the circumstances of the protagonist's father and of Yeon-ju in the 1970s to the present, it reminds us with dread that labor problems persist despite the passage of time; its narrative construction is outstanding."
In the Netflix series <Sweet Gig>, Hyuk-jun (Lee Jae-wook) repeatedly faces situations where people die on the job. Courtesy of Netflix
Forbes wrote, "<Sweet Gig> adds real monsters to the office. It is a workplace comedy for people who have imagined setting the office microwave on fire," adding, "An ordinary convenience store becomes a claustrophobic chamber of horror, and routine tasks turn into hellish shift work. Director Kim finds comic potential in the collision between everyday labor and monstrous terror."
Director Kim Da-min, who directed a long-form series for the first time with <Sweet Gig>, said in a media interview on the 5th, "The word labor is very heavy, but I did not think it could be treated as 100 percent entertainment. I tried to capture how young people, and anyone, work and live."
