Remade in His Own Image: Mark Hogancamp’s Marwencol
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Kingston, New York, sits two hours north of New York City on the Hudson. Refugees from Brooklyn have recently put down their version of roots in the historic and formerly abeyant small city—vinyl record shops, bookstores purveying the kind of coffee topped with microfoam tulips, lounges serving Instagram-ready handcrafted cocktails. In a less frivolous development, an LGBTQ community center now occupies a corner of uptown’s most prominent block.
If this Kingston of 2018 had been the Kingston of the turn of the millennium, the one that is the setting of Welcome to Marwen, the new movie directed by Robert Zemeckis, it is possible that its originating event might never have occurred. Then again maybe it would. Hate has no fixed address.
In that Kingston of yore begins a story about storytelling, revealed from multiple points of view in three different media. It starts in the first hours of April 8, 2000, when a 38-year-old restaurant worker and former U.S. Navy petty officer with a drinking problem was set upon by five men outside a bar. He was beaten so mercilessly that when a bartender found him in the street spent 40 days in the hospital, nine of them in a coma. The bone around his right eye required reconstruction. When he came to, he remembered nothing of life before the assault. He had to relearn how to eat, to walk. He returned home and thought the pairs of women’s high heels piled in the closet must belong to a girlfriend he couldn’t recall. In fact they were his, and they may well have provoked his attack. At trial people testified they’d overheard Hogancamp tell the men he enjoyed cross-dressing.
