Misconception is the fifth feature-length documentary from director Jessica Yu. It purports to be an exploration of the world’s rapidly increasing human population, especially of state interventions into family planning. The importance of the topic is obvious and the intellectual stakes are equally clear, but the film is, if you will allow the pun, a “misconceived” effort.
The initial issue with Misconception is that it never clearly states its intentions. What, exactly, is the question that it hopes to answer? What is the ultimate answer it proposes? These remain unclarified. It is muddled and unfocused. Furthermore, the film fails in all three rhetorical principles: logos, pathos and ethos.
Misconception begins by remarking on the seeming inevitability of human overpopulation before almost immediately quelling such anxieties. Then it dives into three elaborate case studies of three very different individuals in China, Canada and Uganda, respectively. The questions being answered by providing these case studies are never stated, and the linkages between the case studies are superficial at best. An engaged viewer will surely be disappointed about this paucity of clarity. On the level of its logos, then, Misconception feels like three different essays cobbled together haphazardly under the unifying banner of “population stuff.” Needless to say, this is not ideal.
Unfortunately, the complete lack of focus in the argument(s) being made is not the only issue. The individuals selected for the first two case studies are simply unbearable—this, then, is a problem of pathos. The first person the camera follows is a young-ish Chinese man who works as an online wine merchant. He is approaching 30, and his parents are relentlessly harassing him to hurry up and get married. And he wants to comply. The issue is that he must be one of the five most boring, superficial, juvenile and deluded men in all of Beijing, and he is unable to find a suitor. One problem is that he seems incapable of conceiving of a woman beyond the most rote features of her physical appearance—for example, he informs the camera that his wife-to-be must be a specific height and supermodel-thin. What following this man around for the better part of half an hour is supposed to prove to viewers about China’s one-child policy, the nominal justification for journeying to East Asia, is never clarified.
Once the China case study mercifully concludes, it is replaced by an even more grating one. The camera next follows an NGO worker from Alberta as she terrorizes the people of color in her small hometown with her lack of manners and decency. Happily for them, she quickly leaves to attend a UN summit on population issues, where she will represent an anti-abortion group. Her continued ignorance of basic social facts about race, gender and misogyny may be shocking, but it does not make for enjoyable viewing or effective argument. The reasoning for including such an execrable person in the film seems to be to discredit her line of argument by showing just how incapable of normal cognitive and social function she is. Ultimately, however, Yu comes across both as cynical and cruel for embarrassing this woman and out of touch with the film’s audience, who surely do not need such a hard-to-sit-through spectacle for these arguments to be efficaciously made. This is an utter failure of ethos.
The third case study, following an activist journalist who writes a weekly column on the epidemic of abandoned children in Kampala, is thoroughly enjoyable. It is positive in outlook, the protagonist is (finally) charismatic and worthy of the viewer’s attention and the ideas being addressed seem manageable. There is even some clarity in the argument. This third case study would make a stellar documentary short. Again, however, its contributions to the overall thesis of the feature-length film are unclear, because the thesis of the film is itself never apparent.
One final issue with Misconception is that its most enlightening and worthwhile claims are actually borrowed from other visual media. These come from Hans Rosling, a Swedish statistician and famous public speaker on population matters. His speeches are widely available online; in fact, Misconception uses numerous clips from them. This is understating it; the truth is that anything of intellectual or rhetorical merit that Misconception has to say about the human population and institutional efforts to regulate it comes from one or another clip of Rosling speaking. Yu fails to provide any reason why a viewer should watch her documentary at all: its arguments are muddled, its case studies—minus the third one—fail to offer even any human interest let alone persuasive argumentation and the truly intellectually-meritorious moments already existed in screen culture.
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