Who would you be without your story?
Sometime after 8 pm on July 2, 2003, Doug Bruce left his East Village apartment and never came home again.
Another man came to consciousness around 7 am the following morning. He didn't know where he'd come from or where he was going; he didn't recognize the subway he was riding and, most frightening of all,
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he had no idea who he was. He walked into an ER speaking inexplicable British English, well-mannered but distressed at his inability to answer the nurses' repeated question: "What is your name?" Eventually acquaintances arrived to say, yes, this man was Douglas Bruce, and to take him "home," though he recognized neither them nor any of his possessions.
It seems incredible, perhaps most of all to Bruce, who didn't have-and hasn't since-a single memory which reaches prior to his awakening on the train that morning. This unsettling, frustrating doc, filmed by Bruce's once-close friend Rupert Murray, charts his life from that day forward, as Doug struggles to integrate his new self with his past and his loved ones' expectations.
Come to find out, this Doug Bruce guy has it pretty cushy: he's 35, handsome and a stockbroker who recently retired to take up photography. Stymied psychiatrists and neurosurgeons repeat their admittedly pointless diagnosis: Bruce has, for unknown reasons, suffered the rarest of all forms of memory loss, a total retrograde amnesia obliterating his episodic memory-the set of experiences, unique to each person, upon which we ordinarily rely for our identity. Bruce can automatically scrawl his illegible signature; he knows how to walk and
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use a video camera, but doesn't remember how to navigate his own neighborhood, the faces of his family and friends or why he ever loved them. He's also suddenly more introverted and sensitive, and less sarcastic and edgy; will Doug's old friends like the new him, or vice versa?
Murray's film is as much about the reactions of the people in Doug's life; they're by turns devastated, confused and often incredulous-not unlike many critics, who've been speculating since the film's Sundance release that some of its coincidences seem a soupçon JT LeRoy, an accusation Murray has denied. If only his visual vocabulary had been less hackneyed and uneven, and his line of questioning less laboriously, lugubriously existential. Even as is,
Unknown White Male
offers a tantalizing, immediately engaging set of questions, and some astonishing footage of, and narration from, the man who mistook his life for that of somebody else.
