Unknown White Male

A meaningful meditation on memory, this film has been derided by some as a hoax, simply because it seems unbelievable. There is a certain convenience in this case of complete retrograde amnesia happening to Doug Bruce -- handsome, clever, and rich, with lots of beautiful friends in beautiful places -- who happens to have a buddy in filmmaker Rupert Murray. And I would certainly suspect a psychological etiology for the ailment, which is essentially a chance to start one’s life over, simply re-boot and begin again with an empty hard drive, but with all your programs and features in place. But it hardly matters if the anomaly is made up or discovered, since it still raises such interesting questions about memory and identity, mind and brain. Are we the product of our experiences, or is there something essentially us that would remain if our pasts were utterly erased? Despite a suspicious similarity to Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, this film seems authentic enough to be ponderable. The testimony of neuroscientists is interesting nonetheless, mysterious in its own right. The breakdown of amnesia into anecdotal, semantic, and operational is instructive, even if it seems implausible in effect. So anyway, this guy emerges from a fugue state on the subway to Coney Island, with no idea of who he is or how he got there, with no ID and even less recollection than Alberto Gonzales. What follows is the highly mediated story of his starting over and trying to piece together his past. In contrast to Iraq in Fragments, here I thought the stylized camerawork and editing contributed to the documentary’s sense of authenticity, since it conveyed the disoriented state of the subject in an artful way. Who knows, maybe I was hoodwinked, but that hardly makes me think less of the film. (2006, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-65.)