Be More Chill

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Jeremy has a crush on Christine, but of course she’s dating a popular boy and Jeremy will never have a chance with her. He can barely sustain a conversation with her half the time. But somehow he hopes that things might change someday.

The groundbreaking story by New York Times best-selling author Ned Vizzini that inspired the Tony-nominated Broadway musical–now adapted in a graphic novel by #1 New York Times best-selling author David Levithan. Jeremy Heere is your average high school dork. Day after day, he stares at beautiful Christine, the girl he can never have, and dryly notes the small humiliations that come his way. Until the day he learns about the “squip.” A pill-sized supercomputer that you swallow, the squip is guaranteed to bring you whatever you most desire in life. By instructing him on everything from what to wear, to how to talk and walk, the squip transforms Jeremy from geek to the coolest guy in class. Soon he is friends with his former tormentors and has the attention of the hottest girls in school. But Jeremy discovers that there is a dark side to handing over control of your life–and it can have disastrous consequences. A deeper strain of suicidal darkness flows beneath the colour and comedy. High-school kids wish themselves dead or to have never been born. This theme chimes with the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, and Vizzini’s own suicide in 2013 gives it added poignancy. In his lifetime, Vizzini was thanked by young readers who felt helped by his work, and to watch Be More Chill is to glimpse an authentic portrait of the soaring joys and plunging agonies of adolescence. I don't consider this graphic novel as a substitute for the original, because the original is a literary masterpiece, but I would let my 10 year old kid read it as a primer, if I had one

BE MORE CHILL

The way that mental health is treated is abhorrent. When Jeremy encounters a girl who is possibly bulimic, and has mental health issues, he calls her “weird” and does nothing. The girl herself is never seen or mentioned again.

Now, onto my second major complaint. The Super Quantum Unit Intel Processor. The SQUIP. The SQUIP (or squip) is the turning point of the book. The squip's objective is to take an uncool person and make him cool. It makes him be more chill. It does this by implanting itself into the subject's brain (via a travel through the bloodstream after the subject injects the pill that contains the squip). After the squip is in the brain of the uncool person, it feeds the person instructions on how to speak and act. This is a problem. The squip says that having a predatory attitude toward women, disrespecting your parents, and abandoning your friends is cool. Jeremy takes the squip, listens to all of its instructions and you can probably guess where it goes from there. Be More Chill takes place in Metuchen, New Jersey. It is written in the first person, from the perspective of high school student Jeremiah “Jeremy” Heere. Jeremy attends the fictional Middle Borough High School and is considered a loser by many of his peers; the popular girls have no interest in him, and he is constantly bullied. Jeremy's best friend is the music-loving Michael Mell. They sit together at lunch and talk about Jeremy's attempts at wooing his longtime crush, Christine Caniglia. Jeremy is tired of being a loser and hopes to find a way to change this. His main goal in life is to get Christine to notice him, then date her. Jeremy plans to implement his plans as he and Christine both practice for their school play, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. His advances are slow-going at first. Michael tells Jeremy that he's vaguely heard of a pill that can improve someones life; he thinks it's called a "script" and he suspects his brother used one to get a high SAT score.

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The main differences between the book and the musical are that the SQUIP has different agendas in each version. Vizzini’s SQUIP is a Japanese bootleg that hasn’t been released in the US because of the potential safety hazards. It genuinely wants to help Jeremy but realizes that it has messed up badly. Musical SQUIP wants to take over people’s minds and create a universe of ultimate control, like the plant Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors. Because the SQUIP is worse, Jeremy and Michael can behave better in the end.