For those experiencing it, pain unmakes the world. The variegated, branching expanses of perception and memory that form our personal worlds are cut down, contracted into an entirely singular, all-eclipsing sensation. The field of trauma studies tells us that even when it’s over, it’s really not; it can be so difficult for us to integrate pain into the narratives we use to define ourselves that it just floats as if dismembered, waiting to be reenacted and re-experienced, since it can’t be remembered in the standard sense.
Ten years ago, outside a bar in Kingston, NY, five men beat Mark Hogencamp so badly that he was unrecognizable. His face was reconstructed. He spent nine days in a coma, forty in the hospital, and afterwards, he was unable to remember, with much certainty, just who he was because of the brain damage he’d suffered.
While it’s unclear if Mark can remember the pain from the attack itself, it quite literally disassembled his world. He can look at a decades-old picture of him and his wife — they divorced long before the attack — and not remember being there or what that person he married was like. He also couldn’t remember how to walk or write. His belabored journals from the time suggest just what stubborn dedication it took him to relearn cursive, but the two things Mark never relearned were drinking — he was a severe alcoholic before the attack — and drawing, his former love. His hands now shook too badly.
But he did find a substitute. The documentary Marwencol, director Jeff Malmberg’s first film, takes its name from the narrative sculpture Mark has created in his backyard, a 1/6th scale World War II-era Belgian town home to dolls representing both purely fictional characters, as well as Mark’s friends, family, and attackers. Mark was unable to afford the needed physical therapy or counseling after the attack, so Marwencol serves as both. His fine motor skills were improved by assembling the intricate, tiny costumes and painting the dolls’ faces, while the sprawling narrative provides not only a safe place for him to therapeutically work through revenge fantasies in 1/6th scale, but also an opportunity to revisit his own trauma on his doll doppelganger. Finally, by photographing every new development in Marwencol’s story, Mark creates a record that’s harder to erase than his own missing memory.
It would be easy to make comedy out of a grown man spending his life playing with dolls or of Mark telling one of his crushes that her Marwencol character and his Marwencol character fell in love and got married. But it’s more interesting, and challenging, to represent Marwencol as an artwork that is serious, moving, and completely free of irony. Malmberg does so exceeding well, distinguishing Marwencol from many other documentaries about “outsider” artists. So well, in fact, that instead of being surprised, I thought, “It’s about time!” when, in the course of the film’s four years, an art magazine runs a feature on Marwencol, prompting a flurry of interest in Mark’s art and, in the film’s climax, a solo show at a gallery in New York.
Marwencol’s allure is, in part, how intensely personal it is. While much art is autobiographical, what’s unique about Marwencol is that, despite its formal complexity (the town’s story gets surprisingly meta), it was created with no audience in mind. This causes a minor crisis before and after Mark’s solo show. Certain aspect of mainstream artistic success appeal to Mark, especially, he imagines, the adoration of women and the artistic community’s openness to alternative lifestyles. But he also seems to realize that, through his daily act of creation in Marwencol, he’s transformed his life for the better more than fame ever could.
In an art world that’s increasingly insular and commercial, it’s no minor revelation. Literary theorist Elaine Scarry argued in her powerful 1987 book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World that creation, particularly the artistic kind, is the big bang to pain’s black hole. With it, we make not only art objects, but the world itself. Watching Mark’s Marwencol triumphantly expand from literally nothing, even as it crosses the barriers traditionally separating art and life, is proof enough.