marwencol

marwencol is astounding.

as a debut film for director jeff malmberg, this must have seemed like stumbling upon the sentinelese. the subject, mark hogancamp, is a lonely artist who was rendered disabled by a homophobic attack by 5 drunken youths at a bar in kingston, ny. the story, to put it simply, is about hogancamp regaining mastery of his own body and relearning how to become sensate. unable to afford psychological therapy, unable to sit idle, hogancamp decides to create his own therapy by constructing a 1/6th scale town, populated by lifelike 1/6th scale dolls to act out exciting scale-world fantasies with his rugged alterego “hogie”. what follows is quite complicated.

hogancamp’s peculiar hobby is no mere indulgence, for him, this simulacra is as part of his world as his part time job at the local bar is. while totally sincere about the playacting, he’s no idiot – he seems quite aware of the fact that this town he’s created is his inner world. as a man struggling to reclaim a sense of who he once was, he tellingly does not use his fantasy primarily as an escape from life. when he literalizes this fantasy with painstakingly detailed figures, he acknowledges that he must negotiate difficulties with his disability openly and honestly.  in other words, hogancamp’s fantasy isn’t self-deluding, although ostensibly it is wish-fulfillment.

as an unconventional therapy, this does seem quite precarious and indulgent. a viewer could easily get the impression from hogancamp that his brain damage affects his judgement to the point of being unable to tell reality from the contrived melodrama of marwencol. his lonliness, not just in the sense of being physically isolated but being truly alone in his profoundly troubling disability exacerbates this feeling because part of what makes mark so remarkable is that the way he expresses himself is so nakedly optimistic. it’s easy to get the impression that many in this situation would be deeply traumatized to the point of being rendered immobile, yet hogancamp seems bursting at the seams to express himself in some way. if, as he puts it, those men “kicked all the memories out of [his] head”, it would seem that the trauma of  a coma and the subsequent brain damage couldn’t remove his personality.

hogancamp himself is something of an enigma, as well. we learn little by little throughout the film that he is a recovering alcoholic, an expressive and tortured artist and a heels and hose crossdresser, among other things. his exuberance when describing his marwencol scenarios is predictably childlike to some extent, but also somehow grim and determined. even before the attack, it’s not clear whether or not he thought himself an artist but what is clear is that self-expression seems to be compulsive. the existence of his obsessive and habitual “drunk journals” from his former life suggest this kind of expressive necessity as though being inebriated further compelled it. he makes art to make art that can have a holistic effect on his well-being, which is why he’s so utterly bemused by the fact that he has an audience and the respect of his contemporaries. he perceives his audience is even tighter than the small circle of friends and acquaintances he keeps (who he honors with their own doll alter-egos), i.e. himself.

this hermetic interiority inevitably invites comparison to other “outsider art” icons such as darger and gosch. his mannerisms, like chain smoking and heels fetish, suggest david lynch and the late charles crumb. there’s an uneasy play between his cognitive difficulties and small town sensibilities that makes him seem very out of place in a sophisticated setting like a manhattan art gallery, almost like his authenticity and outsider status is being exploited for urbanites.  this is suggested by the film but never totally explored, probably because malmberg does intend in many ways to present things from hogancamp’s perspective. after all, as fascinating as the creator is, his art actually is the star of the show. his photography is completely arresting and naturalistic – as the editor of the arts magazine that promoted his work put it, “without a trace of irony”. for lack of manual dexterity and mental clarity, there is a surprising easiness to the work. the lifelike dolls don’t appear to be posing in the photographs at all; any random shot feels candid and energetic even as doll joints jut out incongruously. rigid faces appear on the verge of speaking. the overall effect of this photography gives the viewer the impression of a grecian frieze or comic book paneling where every photograph suggests another and so on to imply a narrative communicated entirely with visuals.

in the second act of the film, hogie is ambushed and tortured by a roving pack of ss (sound familiar?), he is nursed back to health by his bevy of  townswomen. in parallel, mark hogancamp is describing his attempts to come to terms with the attack, going so far as to revisit the spot where the attack took place. malmberg depicts these important moments leading to hogancamp’s decision to attend his gallery showing because even if they didn’t take place contemporaneously, malmberg feels it’s important we get to experience mark’s triumph over his trauma. in a way, this does feel like a hokey and obvious way to realize the relationship between the fiction of hogie and the reality of hogancamp, except for the fact that hogancamp himself undercuts the director with his own oddly affecting ending that recalls matheson’s the incredible shrinking man.

three and a half stars.