Unknown White Male

Unknown White Male is one of those movies that makes you think, and makes you think HARD. It documents the very odd case of one Doug Bruce, whose ride on the subway in New York City takes an odd turn, when he suddenly develops a severe case of Amnesia and doesn't know a thing at all about his former life. He winds up at a hospital, where a chance piece of paper with a phone number of the Mother of a former date ends up to be the beginning of a literal self-discovery, as friends and family try to put Doug's life back to normal. The interesting part of this is, of course, is whether Doug is willing to accept all of this, or will he reject some of things that he's always loved? This documentary is pretty awesome in it's compounding of the most immediate of life's lessons, and raises some rather interesting questions, such as could you rebuild a person's life exactly as you left it, and most interestingly, and the one that I have a major interest in, is what if people wanted to change some aspects of you that were undesirable to those people? Damn. I know my parents would get first crack at me, and try to create something else. I KNOW this. As I said, this film is a great conversation-starter, it's very well made and interesting, and proved to be one of the best films in the Vancouver Film Festival this past year.

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?

Rupert Murray makes his film directing debut here, in a documentary movie that tells the story of a friend of his, a young man, Doug Bruce, an intense and successful stock broker in New York City who one evening experienced a dissociative fugue state that lasted perhaps up to several days. Once he had come to his senses again, lying in a hospital bed, he realized that he had no memory whatsoever for his past: his identity, name, or personal history. He retained excellent language skills and other instrumental abilities, could learn new material and remember it, and even was able to write his first name accurately - his only link to his past - when registering for medical tests.

Dr. Daniel L. Schacter, a Harvard Memory Psychologist, appears early in the film as a useful talking head, offering us a concise review of the various classes of memory: episodic (personal identity and life events), semantic (general fund of information about the world), and procedural (language skills, how to ride a bike) memory. It is only episodic memory that is compromised in psychogenic amnesia. Bruce's retained language skills and other procedural abilities, and his intact fund of general knowledge, demonstrated that Bruce was suffering from a psychogenic amnesia, not an organic amnesia, i.e., one based on obvious brain damage.

In organic cases, e.g., in Korsakoff's or Alzheimer's diseases, or after severe head trauma, amnesia also is not limited to the past (retrograde amnesia) but also affects the capacity to form new memories and retain newly learned material (anterograde amnesia). An MRI study did show that Bruce had an enlargement, perhaps a tumor, in the area of the pituitary gland, but this could not explain his fugue or memory loss.

Bruce had a broad enough social network – stretching from New York City to London to Spain, where his family live - that it did not take long before he was identified and then looked after by people who know him. The film traces his initial medical evaluations, his reunion with friends and family, and his efforts to reconstruct his life. He does gradually fill in some missing pieces, though even 15 months later he has only patchy recall of his past.

We never do learn of any obvious trigger for his fugue state. Apparently he had never before suffered from such an event. Reference is made to the fact that his mother had died, but that was several years earlier. No other major stressors were disclosed. There was no evidence of trauma or foul play surrounding the onset of the fugue. No so-called "secondary gain" factors emerged, i.e., there was no apparent reward to be gained, or scrape to be avoided, by a convenient (malingered) amnesia episode.

Though in various newspaper accounts since the film's release, we learn that Bruce has indulged in a great deal of self promotion around the matter of his amnesia, never tiring of being the center of attention at Manhattan parties, even starting up a website about his situation. Maybe his initial amnesia was real enough, but these subsequent developments do suggest that sustaining his condition has had its rewards.

This was a very frustrating film for me. I kept waiting for psychiatric treatment to commence, since Doug's amnesia was indisputably psychogenic in origin, or at least for more information on a plausible set of stressors to explain the timing and extent of his problem. Initial evaluation by a psychiatrist is mentioned early on, but treatment apparently never came; it certainly wasn't mentioned. So Bruce's case was very much like a 19th Century case, where everyone agrees on the diagnosis and then just sits around waiting. Cost was certainly no object: Bruce and his family were well off people.

The only interesting aspect of the situation was that everybody agreed on Bruce's largely favorable personality changes after the fugue. He showed a fresh sort of innocence, thoughtfulness, emotional openness and sensitivity, where before the event his friends saw him as brash, cynical, and a more flip wit. But these personality changes weren't dwelt upon as much as I would have wanted. At film's end, we see Bruce building a new, more relaxed life, with a new lover and a new career in the arts.

This film held my attention keenly because of my clinical interest, as I waited in suspense for the other shoe to drop: i.e., for resolution of the problem, or at least elucidation of the causes, as a consequence of psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, or the use of amnesia-busting drugs, e.g., sodium amytal or pentobarbital interviews. Why weren't any of these things tried? Did Bruce duck treatment because he knew he didn't need any? Take away clinical pique, and actually found this film is pretty boring: neither the protagonist nor his friends or family are especially interesting people. Bruce's reunion with drinking buddies in London showed them to be especially dull. My Grade: B- 6/10

Personally I'm a 55 year old white male with a degenerative neurological disorder. In 1993 the randomly occurring damage took out the equivalent of my FAT for those of you who are computer geeks. Presumably all my memories were "there." Just no organized way to find any. Think, of yourself as a library, hit by a flood. The pages of information may still be there. But not even adjacent to each other, much less in the right section of the library.

I'd walked down the hall and had the familiar experience of "what did I come in here for?" But I then realized I couldn't think of _anything_ that I had a "desire" for. I remember thinking, "Do I like blueberry pie?" I couldn't even tell if food in general was something I considered important. All the factual data was there, name, numbers, etc. But nothing about me as an individual. It took five long years to rebuild a replacement personality.

As such, this film was a very intense experience for me. (It did remind me of how much it's possible to love another person.) I would probably preferred to wait and rent it on video. But there were some yahoos (Look up Swift's Gulliver's Travels to understand the term.) who insisted the film was a fake. So I felt obliged to go see it, not just trust the opinion of reviewers like Roger Ebert. My wife and I both strongly disliked the music. As a movie, it's definitely so-so quality. But it's asking a lot to expect that an exceptional event would happen to an exceptional film maker. If Oliver Sacks wasn't a good writer there would be no "Awakenings."

I definitely would recommend that people see the movie if they care about what being an "individual" means. If you have it on DVD, watch the clips of Mr. Bruce before the "event." Get a good sense of that person. Then contrast it with who's there in that body at different times after the event. Note the purity of the love felt by the mother and daughter that first looked after him, while he was still a "child." I've had the experience of doing that with my best friend. The 9-12 months that I helped him put his life back together is the closest I'll ever come to being a parent. I wouldn't trade that joy for anything.

For further reading I would strongly suggest the very entertaining "Phantoms in the Brain" by V. S. Ramachandran and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" by Oliver Sacks. For exploring the limits of what consciousness is "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field" by Kary Mullis. These are both entertaining and informative, if you're not afraid to find out how little you know.

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.