The man who lost his past
The documentary film "Unknown White Male," about a New York stockbroker who loses his memory, is medically implausible. But it offers an important lesson about an overlooked illness.
By Robert Burton
Read more: Movies, Psychology, Science, Neurology, Brains, Life, Mind Reader
Dec. 11, 2007 | Hollywood loves amnesia. From "Spellbound" to "The Manchurian Candidate," "Memento" to "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Mulholland Drive" to wonderful old sci-fi epics like "The Alligator People," somebody is always losing his memory in movies. No matter how good or bad, these films share one powerfully seductive quality; being fictitious, they allow us to suspend our disbelief in the biological plausibility of amnesia in exchange for the romantic notion of erasing our pasts. They allow us to feel what it would be like to recover lost and cherished memories, or to establish an entirely fresh identity from new or even implanted memories.
But how are we to look at fictitious amnesia presented as factual truth? That question has been haunting me for weeks, ever since I rented the 2006 documentary "Unknown White Male." On the film's official Web site, director Rupert Murray introduces his film as the "startling story of Doug Bruce, a man who, for no apparent reason, lost 37 years of life history, who lost every memory of his friends, his family and every experience he had ever known. This true story follows Doug in the hours and months following his amnesia, as he tries to piece his life back together and has to discover the world anew." When the film was first released, it received mostly positive reviews. Roger Ebert called it "an intriguing and disturbing film." Some critics, on the other hand, sensed that it was a hoax.
After having viewed the movie twice, and interviewing Murray, I have little doubt that the movie was made in good faith. Yet Bruce's condition is medically implausible. To me, the real attraction of the movie is that it transforms a viewer into an armchair neurologist, forced to diagnose a bizarre memory loss that has stumped the experts. I cannot imagine a better medical training film for sorting out a neurological from a psychiatric disease, for determining whether a patient's condition is real or imagined.
When we meet him, Bruce is a retired British stockbroker and photography student living in New York City. One day in 2003, he suddenly awakens on the subway to Coney Island, completely stripped of his past; he doesn't even know his own name. He does complain of bumps on his head and a headache, but he isn't aware of having been mugged. Bruce begins his adventure by walking into a police station to seek help. After a series of tests, including MRI and CT scans, reveal no related physical problem, Bruce is hospitalized on the Coney Island Hospital psych ward. The name that a nurse enters in his chart is Unknown White Male. He has no identification but does have a slip of paper with a telephone number, which conveniently leads to a former girlfriend.
Bruce's reimmersion into daily life and into his past is filmed by Murray, an old friend of Bruce's from London and a budding filmmaker. To aid viewers in his journey of self-rediscovery, Bruce provides Murray with his own video footage that he began shooting within a week of losing his memory. Included are conversations with the camera, shots of him returning to his Greenwich Village loft and even his airport reunion with his father and sisters, neither of whom he recognizes or remembers. Describing his first encounter with his father, Bruce said, "My father is not at all what I expected." The viewer is left to ponder how someone without a memory of his father would have expectations of what he would be like.
To understand Bruce's amnesia, imagine how you'd think and act if you had completely lost your personal identity. You'd be sunk in profound terror and confusion. Without a personal background and sense of self, what could you do? What would you want to do? Without a significant fund of prior knowledge about the nature of the world, you would neither understand your confusion nor know what future steps to take to sort things out.
This raises the first serious problem with Bruce's story: Imagining future actions requires past knowledge. In an April 2007 article in the journal Neuropsychologia, a Harvard research team headed by psychologist and memory expert Daniel Schacter suggests that the primary role of memory might not be for reminiscence but rather to facilitate thinking about the future.
In a series of fMRI studies, healthy young volunteers have shown similar areas of brain activation when thinking about past personal memories and when imagining themselves in future events. The Harvard researchers state that "there is no adaptive advantage conferred by simply remembering, if such recollection does not provide one with information to evaluate future outcomes." Supporting evidence for their conclusion is a vast body of neurological literature documenting that patients with damage to areas of the brain vital for laying down past memories have impaired ability to elaborate future scenarios. So, to the extent that one is stripped of one's past, one is cut off from one's future. Conversely, to the extent that one's behavior suggests some understanding of a future, one must not be entirely cut off from one's past.
For Bruce to turn himself in to the police implies some knowledge that the police might be helpful -- a scenario that requires access to prior knowledge of how police behave in general. To carry around a video camera and film his meetings with "old" friends and family, Bruce would have to have some understanding that there was some future value to shooting the film. Without a recollection of his past, he wouldn't be able to project when and where such a movie might be shown, or even who might want to see it. Similarly, in an article that questioned the veracity of the film, the Washington Post asked why Bruce, only days after the incident, registered the e-mail address Unknownwhitemale@yahoo.com? How would Bruce understand that this address might be of future value?
During a phone interview, Murray explained to me that Bruce lost his personal (episodic) memories, but retained his semantic (impersonal factual knowledge of the world, such as that a Chevrolet is a type of automobile) memories. In large part, Murray bases this distinction on his interpretation of the writings of Schacter, as well as on Schacter's discussion of episodic and semantic memory in the movie. But there's more to situational memory than this arbitrary distinction. Knowing the dictionary definition of police isn't sufficient to predict how the police might or might not respond under a wide variety of circumstances, or even if they can be trusted. Think of the complicated and even contradictory impulses you have when someone in a bar suddenly hollers out, "Call the police." Everything from your past experience to geographic location colors your understanding of the word police.
In the movie, Murray refers to Bruce's amnesia as representing a fugue state, a psychological condition of no known cause in which one temporarily (for days or weeks) loses all sense of self. But Bruce's amnesia has persisted to the present. Murray is now unwilling to pin any specific label on Bruce, telling me that none of the experts was able to provide a final diagnosis. In his interview on camera, Schacter suggests that Bruce's memory loss falls into the category of functional or psychogenic amnesia -- two interchangeable terms used to describe a condition of profound loss of past memories, unassociated with any impairment of new memory formation and not explainable by any known medical illness. Schacter affirms that, in the case of Bruce, there isn't any available scientific evidence to explain how such a profound amnesia might have occurred.