The Weirdo Transvestite Re-invented: Marwencol
I recently got a chance to watch Marwencol again. This is not meant to be a review of the film, but more of a commentary. If you’re the kind of person that doesn’t like spoilers then you should probably stop reading.
This film is both terrifying and liberating. I will spill the beans and tell you right now that Mark Hogancamp is a crossdresser. In fact, the reason he was beaten senseless and almost killed was because he is a crossdresser. I did not know this when I first watched it. The film asks you to observe Mark’s work, to see for yourself the beauty of it, and then, after you’re more comfortable with Mark, it reveals the source of the tragedy. This film has haunted me for a while, but it’s taken me a long time to articulate why. Like many transvestites I have a deeply programmed fear of being murdered. Such hate crimes are real and very vivid in our imaginations. Aside from rekindling me with old fears the film also radically changed my understanding of gender-variance in a profound way.
Before I watched Marwencol I was under the impression that you could either be a “weirdo” transvestite or an “executive” transvestite. This all goes back to a simple, but meaningful bit of stand-up comedy by Eddie Izzard. If you’re not familiar with this bit, it’s on Youtube Here (I didn’t want to crowd the layout with too many visuals). Eddie Izzard’s act is one those things that helped me overcome my own depression and self-destructiveness. His act was light and funny, but still incredibly meaningful to me. In retrospect, I had taken his remarks way too seriously. I felt that you could either be a weirdo transvestite, hiding in the closet, concealing your size-thirteen shoes from your relatives and friends, secretly subscribing to fashion magazines, buying bottles of nail polish on impulse, and then purging these possessions every few months or years, to periodically engage in hyper-masculine activities to overcompensate for your own feminine energy of which you were deeply ashamed of. Or you could travel the world, be out and about, confront and educate people about who you are (Cajun style). I saw these “weirdoes” as my enemies. Here I was, trying to live my gender-queer life in a dignified, meaningful way, and these weirdo transvestites were making me look bad. What I should have known from my own experience is that weirdo transvestites are too easy a target. Most of them are in closet. Instead of getting a chance to reveal themselves on their own terms they are often found out by others, stalked, and talked about. Judgment is passed and answers are demanded from them before they could even give themselves a chance of finding them.
The fact the film doesn’t reveal that Mark is crossdresser from the beginning is a brilliant move. The filmmaker is tricking you, yes, tricking you, into your own humanity. You have to feel some sympathy for someone whose life has so brutally been devastated by a group of strangers for vague hateful reasons that when you find out what the reasons were you’d have to turn on your humanity and intellectually propel yourself with acts of mind acrobatic jumps towards discrimination. Plenty of people are capable of those mind acrobatics, but the film nonetheless works brilliantly. Not only because it’s an honest portrayal of an “outside” artist whose work is truly amazing, but because it reveals the source of the imagination is deeply tied in within us. Mark is a weirdo transvestite, but he’s also a wonderful artist and amazing photographer. Being “weird” has essentially been a synonym for feeling alone. To further separate ourselves from those that are vaguely different from us is counterproductive. Perhaps one of the most powerful moments in the film comes soon after Mark reveals his large collection of women shoes. Some of which he collects, some of which he wears. How do you reveal someone who you are on your own terms? He says this:
“If I tell people who I am and what I’m about, I’m true myself. It means I’m not lying to myself. What they do with that is on them. I am not accountable for their feelings or how they perceive it.”
-Mark Hogancamp
The truth is that we are all weirdo transvestites. All it requires for us to live a more dignified and meaningful life is to give ourselves a chance to find out who we are in order that we may explain better to people who we are and what we’re about. What they do with that information is on them. We all want the same thing. We just want to be ourselves. Marwencol isn’t a great film because it tries to explain crossdressing or convince you that it’s normal. It does not even advocate for the creation of hate-crime laws. All it does is tell one story, the story of a person whose life is destroyed by a group of strangers because he disclosed to them the fact that he was different from them. He will forever continue to struggle to piece together some of the most basic qualities of life that most us take for granted. If the fact that you could beat a person senseless, erase their memories, break their bones and psyche and still not stop them from being different doesn’t inspire you or frighten you it should. You can’t fix us. You can’t delete us. You can’t stop us.
That’s vanity.
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