Unknown White Male

A Seattle International Film Festival 2005 entry

Wednesday February 8, 7:00pm The Harvard Exit

On Thursday morning, July 3rd 2003 an Englishman stepped off a subway car in Coney Island New York. Doug Bruce had no memory of who he was before that moment. With nowhere to go he turned to the police. Gradually, with the help of his doctors who diagnosed a rare "fugue state" amnesia, Doug reconnected the threads of his identity and within a few days embarked on a bizarre video diary of his own discovery, ala David Holzman. As he was reintroduced to his family and friends Doug agreed to document his story with an old mate, filmmaker Rupert Murray. "Unknown White Male" plays out as a fairly conventional if well crafted documentary. Murray does demonstrate a talent for striking visual montage, but nothing substantial happens and Doug Bruce never regains his memory. While a hospital video made early on seems to show a man in genuine distress, the sequence of events read like Swiss cheese and are ample fuel for skeptics in a post James Frey,"A Million Little Pieces" world.

Director Rupert Murray has had to fend off accusations that his film is a fake and it's not hard to see why. Murray is a first-time filmmaker and not a documentarian or journalist of any kind. So a few minutes in when Murray intones loudly and unnecessarily with his best imitation of Nick Broomfield, its sheer inappropriateness seems like parody. UWM has to be the least rigorous pose a documentary filmmaker can possibly strike.

It purports to be the story of Doug Bruce, an Englishman in New York who claims one day to have suffered a complete loss of memory. If Murray had any interest in science, he might've happened upon the fact that the fugue state he describes as being incredibly rare is actually quite common. Several cases a year are documented in the UK alone and a fair amount of case history exists from at least the late 19th C. Instead, Bruce is presented as a pioneer, experiencing something of which medical and psychiatric science has little to no knowledge of—all the better to romanticise Bruce's condition, to which Murray applies a gloss more typical of Hollywood.

That Murray is a friend at least explains his access to his subject and offers some explanation for the lack of objectivity. Instead of a probing investigation, Murray pointlessly renders Bruce's experience through endless sequences of unrelated, rapidly cut imagery of buildings, street corners, cloud formations, fireworks, etc., finding much value in that Final Cut Pro license, no doubt.

A fugue state is a dissociative break from identity and, in reality, is brought on by stressful events. No one in Doug Bruce's life has any interest in what might have caused such a break. No one is probed for knowledge of what was going on in his life and Murray hasn't the skill or fortitude to investigate it for himself. One suspects there must be some clues that would further illuminate the situation. E-mails, bank statements, credit card statements, phone records, etc. would contribute something to the picture but none of this figures in Murray's film.

Instead, we get a highly subjective, sketchy portrait of Doug Bruce who seems to exert a high level of control over the people in his life. No one dares to puncture his assertion of total memory loss, instead they welcome his presentation as a Forrest Gump-like sage of simple wisdom—even when that wisdom is directed at his own father with the force of a silenced revolver. Bruce is surrounded by women in NY; his former girlfriend from Poland appears to take up residence in his East Village loft; an Australian woman falls in love with the new Bruce 2.0 claiming he is without fault; another young woman and her mother nearly adopt him as family. They all eroticise Bruce as a man-child. Predictably, his allure is completely irresistible. Murray never investigates this either.

Murray introduces home movie footage of the man previously known as Doug Bruce, who seems little more than a spoilt, almost callow young man of privilege, which is the one constant of both incarnations of Doug Bruce: wealth and privilege. Bruce lived in a loft the size of which even Monica on Friends could only dream about; for all his medical concerns, Bruce doesn't appear to have any financial worries. His bank account apparently allows him to move forward as his new self with complete ease. There is never any apparent change in his lifestyle.

Bruce expresses no surprise or is at all humbled by the rather lofty, elevated circumstances he finds himself in. There is no relief expressed to find that he is not one of the 45 million people or so in the United States without health insurance. One of the joys of memory loss apparently is rediscovering food—especially if you can afford to tool around NY eating in its finest restaurants. For his part, Bruce expresses little distress or curiosity of his former self and is rather pleased to have suddenly just sprung into existence as a grown man cut off from any sense or, more importantly, OBLIGATION of personal history.

The filmmakers, Bruce's friends and somewhat unwillingly, his family, pretty much encourage his voluntary loss of memory or hoax, which isn't meant to disparage any of the participants. But Bruce's claims of complete memory loss are less than convincing. When Bruce returns to London, he states that, in comparison to the women that surround him in NY, his former friends seem "more like lads," a buzzword of '90's London that belies his claim of total memory loss. He also overly obliges the image of himself as innocent yet wise man-child to a fault—when introduced to a newborn, Bruce marvels not only as if he'd never seen one before but as if he'd never before contemplated our origins as infants. It is a ridiculous scenario of over-the-top romanticism of which this film frequently indulges. (Not surprisingly, we're never offered a similar sequence of Bruce rediscovering homeless people in NY or disparate lifestyles.)

That Bruce is able to move forward apparently without the aid of any counselling, more than happy to fashion a self somewhere between Chauncy Gardener and Forrest Gump, even more at ease assuming the lifestyle trappings of a stranger, strains credibility, which isn't to say that he himself doesn't believe it. What's more difficult is Murray's fashionable post-Memento interest in his friend as romanticised contemporary hero. Murray knows there is a story here, he just doesn't have a clue what it is. The complete disposability of Doug Bruce's former self (and, by extension, possibly Murray's present self) is well outside Murray's own awareness.

It's a mockumentary! No, really. Think about it. He wakes up on the subway without either a wallet or a mobile phone and the filmmakers don't comment on this. Him and his buddies shoot some Super-8 home movie footage INSIDE a bar (you'd need lights for this). Everyone's so damned gorgeous. He takes a video camera to an airport to meet his dad. He hugs complete the friends who have become strangers as if they're still his best pals. The acting's mostly good but there are hammy moments too. Watch it again... (you see, now they've got me doing their PR too). It is wonderfully shot though and does contain some genuinely thought-provoking material about the nature of identity and the importance of memories in cementing personality. So when will the filmmakers come clean?

I saw this film last night and was very disappointed with it. It is quite apparent that the filmmakers have no training in how to construct an interesting story. This film is about as interesting as watching someone's home movies. The interviews with Doug, his family and friends make no attempt to delve into the startling revelation that Doug has completely lost all sense of his past. They all might as well be talking about what Doug plans to do after graduating from art school rather than talk about how Doug will handle "re-starting" his existence at age 37. There seem to be some small clues in the film that may explain how poorly it was put together. Doug spends little time back in Europe with his former friends and family and they don't seem to make the journey to visit him either (except for the filmmaker). Doug himself mentions that his British mates seem to have deep feelings for him but they seem concealed by a typical British avoidance of such emotion.

That is exactly how this film feels (or doesn't feel). There is almost no emotional connection to the film or the subjects (even Doug). You don't really even walk away with a "There but for the grace of God go I" empathy towards Doug. The most riveting emotional notes are in the first 10 minutes as Doug recalls the first hours of his amnesia and his complete feeling of being lost and real terror about not even knowing who he might be able to call to come pick him up from the hospital. After that, it is if the film has been sterilized of all emotional "infection". Even as a factual depiction of this extreme form of amnesia it falls very short of being informative or interesting.

Without apologizing for the filmmakers, I can understand how they would not want to use this opportunity to manipulate or exploit Doug's situation or his condition by forcing some kind of confrontation with Doug's past. But the film goers don't get any real kind of bridge with Doug's past either (or his present for that matter). Without that, you can't really move yourself emotionally into either wanting Doug to regain his memory or rooting for him to carry on with a new existence that is different and separate from his past. It is almost as if even his old friends and family didn't really know him all that well so there wasn't much of Doug for them to lose.

This movie should have some kind of theme to it. Loss...renewal...exploration...frustration...something...anything! And the filmmaker would have been better served to get some professional help with the subject and maybe take more time with the project to see if a more interesting story develops.

I agree that it isn't a very rigorous documentary and it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. I have known Doug Bruce casually for about a year and a half. He takes his dogs to the same dog run I frequent. I only found out about the amnesia after the movie was released, and he didn't share anything about the amnesia to anyone else at the run. He would talk about photography, his dogs, just normal stuff. Usually he keeps to himself. He is always very sweet and polite, and does have a certain childlike enthusiasm that is very endearing. Now that the movie is out, he will talk about it a little but obviously feels uncomfortable revealing it to those he doesn't know. I also know a woman who is good friends with Doug's previous girlfriend of eight years who also appears in the film. The ex-girlfriend definitely believes him, as do most if not all of those who knew him well before the amnesia, including his family. The Washington Post just wrote a story which strongly doubted the veracity of Doug's story and his condition. There seems to be a growing, somewhat mean-spirited backlash against Doug. I guess the story just seems too good to be true. People seem to resent the fact that Doug has good looks, money and a lovely girlfriend. But does that mean he's faking amnesia? I like Doug and can't imagine he would go to such extraordinary lengths, especially ones that would distress his family and friends, by inventing such an incredulous story. It just doesn't make sense.