In a Tiny Universe, Room to Heal
Randy Harris for The New York Times
Mr. Hogencamp's home is littered with dolls, doll parts, fighter planes, tanks and jeeps. More Photos »
By PENELOPE GREEN
Published: April 6, 2011
MARK HOGANCAMP died 11 years ago tomorrow, when five men kicked his head in outside a Kingston, N.Y., bar in the early morning hours. He was reborn months later, after he awoke from a nine-day coma, his memory wiped nearly clean of the details of his life — his early marriage, girlfriends, family, Navy service, thundering alcoholism, homelessness, jail time — and he had to relearn how to eat, walk and think at age 38. Feeling shunned by the outside world, he created his own world, a tiny society called Marwencol.
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Randy Harris for The New York Times
The photographer Mark Hogancamp with Deja, a Barbie he uses in his work. More Photos »
Made from scraps of plywood and peopled with a tribe of Barbies and World War II action figures, Marwencol grew along the side of his trailer home near Kingston. (Mr. Hogancamp named his new world after himself and Wendy and Colleen, two women he had crushes on.) Narratives surrounding a downed American fighter pilot rescued by Marwencol’s all-female population began unfurling against a backdrop that was nominally a World War II setting, in Belgium. The themes, however, were Mr. Hogancamp’s own: the brutality of men, the safe haven of a town of women, the twin demons of rage and fear. Mr. Hogancamp captured his stories with thousands of photographs, shooting on an old Pentax with a broken light meter. The noirish images, complete with blood flecks in the snow, are riveting and emotional.
How these photographs made their way into an art magazine, and then a Manhattan gallery show — “Mr. Hogancamp has an uncanny feel for body language, psychology and stage direction,” Jerry Saltz wrote in 2006 in The Village Voice — and how Mr. Hogancamp negotiated the blessings and pitfalls of what he calls his second life, was the subject of “Marwencol,” a documentary that made its debut at the South by Southwest film festival last spring and roared through the festival circuit in the fall, accruing an armful of awards. (The film is being released on DVD and Blu-ray next week and will be shown on thePBS series “Independent Lens” on April 26.)
There were accolades for the filmmaker, Jeff Malmberg, who captured his subject with generosity and warmth, and for Mr. Hogancamp, who was embraced for his artwork, his openhearted world view and his stunning collection of women’s footwear. (When Mr. Hogancamp returned home after the beating, he discovered a closet full of women’s pumps and boots. “Do I have a girlfriend?” he asked a friend. “They’re yours,” the friend replied. “You collect them and you wear them.” Mr. Hogancamp then learned that the men who beat him did so after he told them he was a cross-dresser.)
For this reclusive man, still tender from post-traumatic stress disorder and brain damage (and also, he imagines, years of hard drinking, though he can’t remember the craving for alcohol), the last year has been painful in all sorts of new ways, as he has shared Marwencol, and himself, with an ever-widening sphere of people. He now has an unlisted phone number. He gets frustrated when he has to take time away from building sets and shooting scenes at Marwencol, which he works on every day, dropping into the action with intense focus and losing himself for hours. And there have been the gut-roiling challenges of attending movie screenings, digging deep for the courage not only to leave his home but also to face a crowd, figuring out what to wear. A skirt and heels are calming, he said, “but that’s what got me beaten to death.”
It was the left side of his brain that was damaged by the battering, “the decision-making part, the linear stuff,” he said. “I have a very difficult time making a decision. I have to mull it over for a few days, think it over from front to back. People think I’m all brainy, but it’s just that I’m alone and I have so much time to think. They don’t see me when I wobble.” All five of his attackers were convicted of their crime; only three served jail time.
On a rare warm March afternoon, a few days before his 49th birthday, Mr. Hogancamp had flung open the windows of his trailer so that a reporter could breathe while he smoked. With his thick, wavy hair and a Pall Mall 100 clamped tight in an impish smile, Mr. Hogancamp resembled a character out of “The Great Escape,” full of can-do spirit.
The place looked magical: Fighter planes hung from the ceiling; doll parts and tiny accessories — wire-rim glasses the size of a wedding ring — were jumbled on counters and tables. If each home is a refuge, this one is as fortified as a medieval castle. Tucked into every corner were women — dolls one-sixth the size of real women, that is. Some were Barbies, like Deja, the Witch of Marwencol, who wears her metallic green hair in a Louise Brooks bob. Others, like Anna, who is blond and Germanic-looking, were World War II action figures.
“I’m building an army of women,” Mr. Hogancamp said. “Women rule the world. We’re just here to keep them company.”
He is represented here as well: his alter ego is an American fighter pilot doll named Captain Hogie, a Nicolas Cage type with smoldering eyes and a deep scar running across his face.
Many of the dolls were gifts. So was the music, Marlene Dietrich and other World War II-era idols singing tinnily on a CD player.
Since the movie’s debut, Mr. Malmberg has set up a Web site for Marwencol, where he posts new scenes that Mr. Hogancamp photographs, and invites viewers to support Mr. Hogancamp by donating to J&J Hobbies, Mr. Hogancamp’s favorite store, a Kingston hobby shop. Some send money, which Mr. Hogancamp uses to buy new figures and supplies. Other gifts are more personal, like this CD. On his birthday, Janet and Mark Wikane, the store’s owners, presented him with a box sent from St. Louis, filled with wooden dollhouse furniture and clothes. Friends give him bags of pantyhose and cast-off size 8 pumps.
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An old high school friend living in California, who found him online, sends pantyhose, too. And last winter, her husband sent Mr. Hogancamp a model of a P-40 fighter plane, which now hangs in his workroom, over the vast miniature universe he has set up there. A huge dollhouse is filled with furniture and characters lounging around a bar painted with the words “Hogancamp’s ‘The Ruined Stocking’ Catfight Club” — some are sprawling in chairs, others are fighting over nylon stockings.
“Watch your head on the landing gear,” he warned.
There is a long list of buyers eager to purchase Mr. Hogancamp’s artwork, but for now they will have to wait until Mr. Malmberg and others set up a disability trust for him.
“We can’t jeopardize his disabled status,” Mr. Malmberg said. “And what if the appetite for his work fades?”
MR. HOGANCAMP lives from disability check to disability check. To save money, he eats one meal a day (the other night, it was chicken and rice with jalapeño peppers and melted Velveeta). He buys groceries every Tuesday, when a neighbor gives him a lift to the Cumberland Farms store five miles away.
In November, the deli where he used to shop went out of business. It was just two miles away, and he could walk there by himself, keeping steady by focusing his eyes on the lines at the side on the road, and staying calm by dragging behind him an Army jeep the size of a handbag filled with Deja and the other girls, all armed to the teeth to keep him safe. The trip was also helpful in that it wore down the factory seams on the jeep’s rubber tires (Mr. Hogancamp is a stickler for detail).
Six years ago, these trips drew the attention of David Naugle, a local photographer. He drove by Mr. Hogancamp and his tiny convoy a number of times before stopping to ask Mr. Hogancamp what it was all about. Within a few days, Mr. Naugle received a stack of Marwencol photographs in the mail. Stunned by the narrative and by Mr. Hogancamp’s skill as a photographer, he sent them to the editor of Esopus, an art journal, where they were published, along with Mr. Hogancamp’s story, in the fall of 2005.
As it happens, Mr. Malmberg, the filmmaker, subscribes to Esopus. Such are the providential events of Mr. Hogancamp’s “second life.” That the beating erased so much of him it took away his taste for alcohol is another. Not that there isn’t a record of that part of his life.
In spiral notebooks and bound journals, on sheaves of paper stuffed into portfolios, filling sketchpad upon sketchpad, are Mr. Hogancamp’s drawings and diary entries, dating back to 1984, the year he entered Navy boot camp. They detail, in vivid prose and gorgeous superhero-style sketches, his battle with alcohol, his spells of homelessness and his tours in rehab, along with the outfits of the women at the lighting company where he once worked designing retail showrooms.
The last sketch he made is of Marilyn Monroe. It’s half-finished, but he can’t complete it. The beating erased his ability to draw.
“I’ve gotten over the anger,” he said. “Wanting to go out and kill all men just because they took from me what I loved the most. That’s why I created my own world where my people love me for who I am. I treat them with respect; I cover them up so that when I set them up they perform easily for me. They are my little actors and actresses.”
Now, he said, “I am a one-sixth-scale film director formerly known as an artist.”
Wearing a black “Phantom of the Opera” T-shirt, a black pencil skirt and shiny black patent leather pumps with stiletto heels and ankle straps, Mr. Hogancamp showed off his shoe room. This reporter, who was feeling like a schlub in her worn black clogs, slipped on a pair of his vintage ’80s suede boots with fringe. Her host beamed.
Outside, in Marwencol, leaves skidded among the buildings. Kneeling down, you felt transported — you could almost hear rifle shots and Dietrich singing.
Mr. Hogancamp shimmied into one structure, demonstrating how he shoots through its windows in the rain. “Cute, eh?”
He recalled a high point of the last year. In October, when the IFC Center in Manhattan screened the documentary, a few friends drove Mr. Hogancamp there for the premiere. His mother had died several days earlier, and his inclination had been to hunker down and nurse his grief. But he muscled through.
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He wore a British motorcycle jacket with “Hogancamp” painted on the back, a relic from his homeless-shelter days, along with black pants and “man shoes,” but underneath he had on a pair of silver-seamed stockings and, in his knapsack, he carried his lucky shoes, the patent leather pumps. After the movie, there was a question-and-answer session with Mr. Malmberg, the filmmaker; his wife, Chris Shellen; and Mr. Hogancamp, who slipped on his heels for courage.
At the end, a woman yelled, “Get up on stage and show us your legs,” so Mr. Hogancamp did. He rolled up his pants to reveal his slim ankles, a flash of seamed stockings and those shiny stilettos. The audience gave him a standing ovation.
“After the audience piled out and I was out the sidewalk,” he continued, “women were coming up to me with stars in their eyes, like I was Clark Gable. They wanted to touch me. I was like, ‘I’m just a regular dude, surviving.’ They told me they loved my shoes. And it was like I was carried away on a cloud. Nobody could bring me down that night.”
LOVE is one of life’s biggest risks, and contemplating it is shattering for Mr. Hogancamp. But he has been practicing, watching men and women together on television with the keen eye of an anthropologist, and speaking out loud to his little actresses. “I keep the conversation going,” he said.
He opened a drawer in his bureau. On top were photographs of both his grandfathers, and one of the Savannah, the Navy ship he served on for three years. Does he remember that? “Nope,” he said.
The drawer was filled with foundation garments, including a festive merry widow, and many, many pairs of stockings. “If I open the drawer,” he said, “I can pretend there’s a woman here somewhere.”
What would she be like?
“If she’s artistic and can get into all this,” he gestured around the trailer, at the Messerschmitt and Spitfire models hanging from the ceiling, at Deja, Anna and the girls tucked into bed on the sofa, “if she can play with dolls, if she’s just happy with Payless nylons and Payless shoes, I want to share my empire with her.”
“I don’t want a gold diggah,” Mr. Hogancamp joked. “We could watch a good movie together, cry together and just enjoy each other for who we are. That’s my dream.”
Meanwhile, he is safe at home in Marwencol, and happy to be playing both parts.
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