I recently got into Be More Chill – I know, I missed the bandwagon on that one by quite a bit, but I don’t mind. As with a lot of polarizing pop culture things, I find it to be neither Teh Best Musical Eva!!!! or The Worst Thing Ever to Happen to Broadway! Instead, I enjoy it, finding a lot of the songs catchy and the plot more than a little messy (even as I get a kick out of its “what if you fed Dear Evan Hansen to Little Shop of Horrors?” energy.) All that said, I positively love the SQUIP and make no apologies about that (spoilers.)
The central premise of Be More Chill is this: Jeremy, high school dork and seemingly-incurable loser, gets turned onto a hush-hush pill that promises to solve all his social problems. The pill is the delivery system for a SQUIP, a Super Quantum Unit Intel Processor – in short, an extremely high-tech computer that implants itself in Jeremy’s brain and teaches him how to be cool. If it sounds too good to be true for an awkward, anxious kid, that’s because it obviously is, and by the end, Jeremy has to defeat his SQUIP to keep it from taking over the world, learning a valuable lesson about being himself in the process.
Listening to the cast recording, I immediately enjoyed the SQUIP, even as it was plain that it’s pretty terrible. The way it increases Jeremy’s social status is by a potent mix of manipulation, negging, slut-shaming, and leaving Jeremy’s nerdy best friend in the dust. It regularly insults Jeremy, it sees people as a means to an end, and its ultimate goal, irrespective of Jeremy’s desire to be popular, is to propogate itself in other minds in a total “rise of the machines” scenario. The SQUIP is the villain of the piece, and it’s plainly A Problem.
But it’s just such an entertaining one. While, for me, movies and TV are filled with endlessly-watchable villains/antagonists like Spike, Moriarty, and Loki, I’m not as used to seeing characters like that in musicals. The SQUIP fits the bill, though, and to borrow again from my earlier comparison, it’s definitely the Audrey II of the show. It’s funny, it’s sinister, and it has some of the best songs. I love the titular “Be More Chill,” and “The Pitiful Children” is such a banger.
As much fun as it is on the cast recording, I found I loved the SQUIP even more when I saw a clip of it in action from the original Broadway cast. So not only is it a hyper-advanced computer who speaks like Point-Break-era Keanu Reeves, but it also dresses in gleaming white anime streetwear adorned with motherboard patterns? Yes, give me all of that, and also give me its oddly-inhuman hand motions. It’s every bit as cool as it is weird, and I appreciate that in a villain.
I also like the fact that while, as I said, the SQUIP is totally a problem, its stream of putdowns and pickup-artist tendencies are actually just part of its programming. I find that really interesting. If it were a person, it’d be terrible, but as a quantum computer designed to help teenagers be cool, it fulfills that function with mercenary efficiency. It is highly effective to make Jeremy comply with its instructions by berating him, and it is relatively easy to make other teenagers like Jeremy by manipulating them. Even its megalomaniacal moves toward the end of the show aren’t as strictly self-centered as Audrey II’s in Little Shop of Horrors. By convincing Jeremy to SQUIP his classmates, the SQUIP is spreading its power and influence, but it’s also ensuring a smoother path for Jeremy’s social climb by removing the variables of human nature. When it tells Jeremy, “I’m going to improve your life if I have to take over the entire human race to do it!”, it’s being weirdly sincere, which adds an interesting slant to the proceedings.
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