South Korean pop culture is rife with sinister stories of systemic breakdown and authority not to be trusted, from Netflix’s runaway hit Squid Game to the more recent Paramount+ series Bargain, which involves an organ harvesting/prostitution ring busted up by a cataclysmic earthquake. (Yes, really.) The new two-part docuseries Crush, also on Paramount+, goes right to a high-profile, real-life source of such anxieties: the chaotic 2022 Halloween crowd catastrophe in Seoul’s Itaewon neighborhood that left 158 people dead (plus one survivor driven to taking their own life by guilt).
It’s a horrific tale, told calmly and soberly by the team behind 11 Minutes, which takes a similarly ground-level, granular approach to the 2017 mass shooting at the Route 91 country music festival in Las Vegas. The dissection of calamity is a somber if important filmmaking specialty, even if Crush seems to rush a bit toward its finish line, perhaps so aghast that it just wants to be done with the pain and the shame. And make no mistake: There is shame here, in the form of police negligence that remains largely unpunished, beyond the disciplining of some low-level functionaries. As is so often the case in such episodes, those at the top have largely skated free.
Crush leans heavily on the accounts and amateur video footage of survivors, many of them American study-abroad students who went out that night as a group (it is fair but not damning to say that this study of a Korean disaster could use a few more Korean faces, although several arrive in due time). What they describe, and what they captured with their cellphone cameras, unfolds like a slow-motion nightmare. Costumed revelers came out in droves the night of Oct. 29 to celebrate Halloween in Seoul’s party-hard Itaewon district, known for its club scene and LGBTQ-friendly vibe. Eager to let their hair down following a year in which the annual festivities were squelched by Covid, the crowd, made up mostly of people in their 20s, instead walked into a death trap.
It was really just an alley into which hundreds of partiers funneled. At first it was uncomfortably crowded. It slowly got worse. And then it became literally suffocating, as people began to pass out standing up, the panic mounted, and bodies began to fall, one stacked on top of another. The descriptions are excruciating, from the physical reality of not being able to breathe to the mental acceptance that death is near and likely. It’s up to you if you want to go there, but Crush certainly puts you there, one eyewitness account and video clip at a time. Few documentaries utilize on-the-fly cellphone footage to this extent, or with such effectiveness. The series often plays like a collection of dreadful memories come to visual life.
The second episode morphs from sadness to rage as it grapples with the unavoidable question: How does something like this happen at the heart of a major metropolitan area in the year 2022? The first phone calls from the scene to the police came at around 6:30 p.m., warning that the situation was getting dangerous. Subsequent calls flowed in all evening, for the next several hours. And yet the police did nothing until it was far too late. Why? Some interviewed in the series believe the South Korean government so devalues youth culture and young citizens that authorities were willing to sit on their hands as the clock kept ticking (again, the Itaewon crowd skews young, especially on a night like the one in question).
Joohwan Hong, a reporter for the Korea Center for Investigative Journalism, points out in the series that most government officials, who tend to be in their 50s and 60s, scorn youthful celebration: “The older generation thinks it’s a waste of time when they could be studying and saving money.” This idea of a fatal generation gap is fascinating, and while Crush pulls at this thread, it could have pulled some more. This is the rare docuseries that could easily have been an episode longer, delving into social analysis with a tenacity to match the detailed on-the-ground reportage and postmortem on the lack of responsibility taken by government officials (victims’ families are still fighting for a comprehensive investigation of the Itaewon disaster). But Crush is still a worthy endeavor that provides needed clarity and a platform for those who lost friends and family that fateful night. It’s not easy to watch, but bearing witness is rarely a source of escape.
"crowd" - Google News
October 17, 2023 at 09:00PM
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Seoul’s Halloween Crowd Crush Killed 159 People and Police Were M.I.A. - Rolling Stone
"crowd" - Google News
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