The Misconceived

A loose sequel to artist-filmmaker and writer James N. Keinitz Wilkins and writer Robin Schavoir’s previous film The Plagiarists (2019), Wilkins’ The Misconceived (2026) loosely revisits his former archetypal protagonist – an aspiring filmmaker who makes commercials for a living – and fast-forwards to his bleak reality as a disillusioned gig-worker. Now, in his late-30s and a single parent, Tyler is ostensibly the one who never “made” it. On one level, The Misconceived operates as a labour satire, staging the class tensions between a medley of construction workers – Tyler; the older, traditional blue-collar Widgey; and Mickey a gen-Z trollish stoner, whose abrasive race jokes provide fraught comic relief – and their well-to-do sculptor boss, Tobin, who salivates at the prospect of inclusion in the Whitney Biennial. As it turns out, Tyler and Tobin were formerly friends at college and the film ripples outward from the strain of that shared past and the widening gulf of their present economic realities. This culminates in an explosive debate between Tyler and Tobin at Tobin’s studio visit-cum-party, staged to impress a goth, Gen-Z curator.

As we learn, Tobin is a self-titled “mid-level artist” with a gallerist and collectors to show for it, yet he still agonises over his relevance within the logics of a trend-led art market. Tyler, on the other hand, is understandably world weary, having relinquished his ambitions for the game of survival. Insidious class concerns permeate and drive every interpersonal relationship in a sharply wry way: Tobin constantly gestures towards Tyler as “one of us”, rather than the working-class “hillbillies”, while Mikey treats Tyler with suspicion, sensing the imprints of his creative-class employers’ higher education. Even while Tobin painstakingly marks himself out as a “woke” liberal boss – eager to display a veneer of racial literacy – his paternalistic attitude towards his workers reveals a clear master-slave dialectic. That is, until he becomes incredibly flustered for being called out by Mikey for having a fetish for Asian women.
On a meta-level, the film begins to actively dissect itself, with its self-interrogatory corrosive form that critiques the conditions of artmaking itself. Here, Wilkins’ medium is the message. Made in Unreal Engine, an open-source videogame software, with characters rendered through motion capture technology, and soundtracked to Pond5 royalty-free stock music, Wilkins’ no-budget materialist satire reveals the economic stakes at play within the manufacturing of a feature film: most of the central characters are human avatars, made uncannily expressive, in part due to their flaws (for a year, Wilkins spent all his time on learning how to use the CG software, as he couldn’t afford to make a live-action feature), whereas the caricatured minor characters are lifted from stock cartoon models: Mikey literally appears as a troll with sharp ears, while the Gen-Z Whitney Biennial curator is drawn from a sultry “vampire” model. Wilkins even takes the time to include brand imagery purchased from a digital marketplace – the unmistakable mauve of the Whitney Biennial catalogue is repurposed as a placemat, while BOMB and New Yorker magazines haphazardly adorn various surfaces – props that expose how art itself has become condensed into a series of brand-markers, packaged neatly into their distinctive fonts.                

Furthermore, Wilkins deliberately employs the formal syntax of the indie film – close-up shots, fast cuts, excessive dramatic music, gendered bickering, and a climactic party sequence – to foreground the economic pressures that manufacture films into neat, recognisable packages in a risk-averse industry. What does it mean to create a viable feature film within the current conditions? How much integrity must be relinquished to fit within the sanctioned categories of auteurism? When Tobin incessantly inquires after Tyler’s screenplay, he refers to the neat topographical quirks of indie filmmaking – from the Safdie Brothers with their NYC grit, or Soderberg’s “iPhone style” – nothing can escape the “brand” of auteurism. During the climactic debate sequence, Tobin and Tyler’s argument is stitched together with wholesale lifts from Richard Brody’s “Best Films of 2023” write-up and Violet Lucca’s critique of Wilkins’ own work, as if offering a final derision of the ouroboric loop that plagues the creative industry. Originality is pulverised by consumer-is-always-right production chains, while dinner-party debates are animated by ideas rehashed from web essays, and authenticity is now but a mirage of another era.                      

Wilkins’ own pessimism ventures beyond parody, into a lucid form of self-recognition: he too has been featured in the Whitney Biennial, so where does he sit? Between the half-defeated filmmaker and the wily mid-career artist? Even as The Misconceived formally questions its own right to exist within the cluttered world of content, it treads forward, with all the cynicism of an artist who has been on both sides of the moon, and knows that neither path is worth taking – all can only lead to disillusionment in a system designed for you to lose, either one’s own integrity or one’s livelihood.