Unknown

White

Male

Doug Bruce (looking off).jpg

Image courtesy of Wellspring Media

Imagine taking a subway ride out to Coney Island; but, somewhere alone the way you suddenly “wake up” realizing you don’t know where you were going, where you are from, or anything personal about yourself – even your own name. This is exactly what happened to former stockbroker Doug Bruce in July of 2003 when he “woke up” on a New York Subway experiencing a complete loss of identity. In the documentary, Unknown White Male, filmmaker Rupert Murray attempts to help Doug piece together the bizarre chain of events surrounding Doug’s mysterious amnesia by chronicling this re-introduction to himself.

What is it about the last two films I’ve reviewed that has made me dig out my old textbooks? One week it was Film History, this week it’s Abnormal Psychology. What’s next…that godforsaken Algebra book I can’t sell back? Oh well, it looks like you’re going to have to bear with me as I refresh myself on dissociative fugues, memory, and malingering.

During that fateful Coney Island trip, Doug Bruce entered into a dissociative fugue, which, according to the American Psychiatric Association, occurs when a person “travels suddenly and unexpectedly from his or her home or place of work, is unable to recall past personal information, and either becomes confused about his or her identity or assumes a new identity (either partially or completely)”[1] Of course, because, fugere means “flight” in Latin, some refer to the disorder as “amnesia on the run.”[1][2] Maybe Unknown White Male should have been called “Convenient Identity Crisis Filmed on the Run.”

Unfortunately, the visual style of Unknown White Male defeats the very stability Murray is trying to help Doug relocate. By using formal elements of avant-garde impressionism (blurred images, distorted angles, fluctuating film speeds, and psychedelic techno music) to fill the gaps between interviews, reunions, and rediscoveries, the overall effect of the jarring visual distortion does little to accurately represent memory loss within the otherwise contemplative and mysterious tonality of the film.

Also, by having the narrative structure of the film jump between talking head testimonies given by police and stumped psychiatrists, inconclusive interviews with friends and family, and Doug’s own limited recollection of events, it doesn’t take long for the film to start resembling Doug’s own scrambled mental state as our memory-challenged hero tries to reassemble the pieces of his baffling identity crisis.

Yet, because Murray keeps the audience in the dark about the people who eventually identify Doug in the psychiatric hospital – Eva Eckert and her daughter Nadine – you don’t even realize how manipulative the fragmented narrative structure is until the very end. Why? I’m guessing it’s because Eva and Nadine just happen to be the only two people in the film who bother to question the validity of Doug’s amnesia claim.

“Falsely claiming amnesia as a way of escaping responsibility is malingering, an attempt to fabricate symptoms or make false claims for personal gain.”[3] The light bulb went on over my head as soon as I realized that the million dollar question was: Can movie-making be classified as “personal gain?” Duh. Since issue of Doug’s possible malingering is not addressed until the last 15 minutes of the film, you almost have to wonder if Murray is making the subject seem taboo on purpose – as if we’re not supposed to think that’s even a possibility.

Naturally, at that point, I wasted no time dragging out the old Abnormal Psychology textbook to do a little fugue research of my own. More often than not, the new identity created by individuals in a fugue state is “incomplete and fleeting” because their “former sense of self soon returns in a matter of hours or a few days.”[4] Granted, there is the less common fugue state which “lasts for months or years and involves travel to distant cities or foreign lands and assumption of a new identity.” [5] Yet, even though it is possible, I’m having a hard time believing that Doug’s fugue has lasted for two years.

The more I think about the details of Doug’s case, the more I realize there are too many discrepancies between his symptoms vs. textbook symptoms, philosophical questions vs. psychological studies, and malingering vs. ethical filmmaking. Come on, even the main point of the film views his condition as a way for Doug to pick and choose the personality traits he wants to keep as he continues to rediscover his former self. I may not be a mental health professional, but I find his eagerness to recreate an entire new personality just a little too far fetched to be completely believable – especially since even “clinicians can find it difficult to distinguish true amnesia from amnesia that is faked to allow a person to get a new start in life.

Be that as it may, Doug’s dissociative fugue provides Murray with an incredible tale to document. All of us would like the chance to start over and change the aspects of our lives we don’t like; however, because “fugues are usually transient and terminate abruptly,” my cynical nature really hopes the camera is still rolling on the day Doug’s memories come flooding back.[7] Now that would make a great movie!

[1] Nevid, Jeffrey S., Spencer A. Rathus, and Beverly Greene. Abnormal Psychology in a Changing World. 4^th Edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000, p. 212.

2 Nevid, p. 212.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Nevid, p. 213.

7 Nevid, p. 218.