Agenda Movie Club: Marwencol

Marwencol

Jeff Malmberg

2010

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

- Mark Twain

So, this is a documentary. This is its subject:

This guy, Mark Hogencamp, was a drunk who was attacked by four (?) hoodlums outside a bar and left brain-damaged. He went to physical and emotional/psychological therapy for a while, but then his insurance ran out. So they cut him loose. He created his own “therapy” that involved building an elaborate 1/6-scale WWII-era Belgian town called “Marwencol” (named after him, “Mark” [Mar], someone whose name I didn’t catch [Wen], and his former neighbor, “Colleen” [Col]) and filling it with soldiers, busty women, and Nazis.

He put “alter-egos” of people he knew, most importantly himself, in this town, and they acted out various stories. He owned a catfight-themed bar (“all the fighting is staged,” he is sure to point out), the SS would raid the town at various times (with varying rates of success) and then be brutally revenge-murdered by the women of Marwencol, and so on. I’m not doing this justice. His stories were so elaborate and surprising that I can’t describe them sufficiently here. The man has an imagination.

You may have heard something about this somewhere, because Hogencamp also took beautiful, cinematic pictures of the town and the dolls living in the town as they lived these stories, and he was eventually discovered by a photographer who told his friend, a magazine editor, about Hogencamp. Hogencamp ended up with an exhibition in Greenwich Village.

Not that he was completely excited about that. He was nervous. He had such a hard time relating to people. And his photos weren’t “art,” they were his therapy. So was it really the right thing to do to exhibit them?

Again, I can’t do justice to the man’s complexity. Did I mention he owns over 200 pairs of women’s shoes? You know, because he likes to wear them. No big deal. And he spends much of the movie lamenting his lack of a woman’s touch– he was once married, but it seems that ended well before he was originally attacked, and probably because of his drinking. It seems a little hard to think that he’d be able to connect to an adult woman on a meaningful level now, but stranger things have happened. I hope I’m wrong about that.

He seems nice enough, but also creepy enough. I suspect that has something to do with his difficulty relating to people, but maybe he’s just kind of creepy. I don’t know. All these words I’m using just don’t seem to have enough nuance.

You’ve never seen anything like this, that much I know. I didn’t talk about how, eventually, his alter-ego in Marwencol is attacked by the SS and in order to deal with his attack, he starts to build a 1/6-scale model town and populates it with tiny dolls and takes pictures of them. Yes. His alter-ego, the doll, does this.

It’s fascinating to see the things people will do in order to have some control over their lives. I was reminded, in a strange way, of the man who rammed nails through his body parts in the documentary, Sick. That man had cystic fibrosis, and lived waaay longer than he was supposed to with it, and took control of his body by doing physical damage to himself. This man, Hogencamp, took control of his world by creating a new one.

I’ll post the trailer below, but I’ve really only scratched the surface, here. I haven’t even mentioned the Belgian Witch of Marwencol or her time machine. Life is so strange and interesting.

One thing, though– how is it that Steve McQueen can still steal our women, even though he’s dead and in doll form? One of Hogencamp’s co-workers (“Mediterranean Lisa,” I think he called her) wanted her alter-ego to have a tall, dark, and handsome boyfriend. So Hogencamp hooked her up with a Navajo doll (I think it was Navajo). She was happy until she found out that Steve McQueen lived in Marwencol, too. She dumped her tall, dark, and handsome Navajo boyfriend for Steve McQueen.

Not that I can say I blame her, but still. Damn you, Steve McQueen.