PAST LIFE THERAPY
'Unknown White Male' documents a real-life memory loss
By Andy Klein
Near the beginning of 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we see Jim Carrey's character taking a train out to Montauk on Long Island; he is clearly haunted in some way by ... something ... that he can't quite pin down. What we eventually discover is that he's voluntarily had his memory erased after a painful breakup but, during the procedure, had regrets and managed to leave himself a subconscious message.
The beginning of Rupert Murray's Unknown White Male is similar: Douglas Bruce comes to awareness (wakes up?) on a train to Coney Island. He feels ill at ease in ways he can't pin down at first. And then it hits him: He has no idea how he got there. Worse yet, it successively dawns on him that he can't remember anything about anything, that he doesn't even know who he is, and finally, with a rush of panic, that this isn't the way it's supposed to be at all.
The similarities are so striking that you might at first suspect Murray's film to be a cheap knockoff, except for one little detail: It's a documentary. What we are seeing is actually Doug re-creating his trip for Murray. The real event took place on July 2, 2003: Doug got off the train, futilely searched his pockets and backpack for some form of ID, and finally went to a police station, from which he was eventually sent to Coney Island Hospital. (The film makes no mention of checking his fingerprints or DNA.)
The obvious assumption would be that someone knocked him out and stole his wallet. Indeed, bumps were found on his head, but the doctors didn't think they could have caused the memory loss. An MRI revealed a small growth on his pituitary gland, but the doctors ruled that out as well; apparently the cyst had been there since birth, and there had been no change that could be relevant to memory. (By the end of the film, the cyst does change in scary ways, raising a suspicion that the doctors are wrong, even though they continue to cling to the same story.) An attending neurologist says he had never seen anything like it ... except in textbooks and, of course, in movies, where such severe retrograde amnesia happens so frequently that it's become a wheezy plot device. Like the Shootout in the Dusty Town Square or the Multiple Personality Psycho Killer, there may be more occurrences in fiction than in real life.
In the manner of many such thrillers, the only clue to Doug's identity was a woman's name and phone number on a slip of paper stuck inside a book in his knapsack. Police contacted the woman, who was distracted and didn't recognize the description. (She couldn't come down to the station because she was busy looking after her 90-year-old mother, who, in an interesting connection, has dementia.) But, after some delay, her daughter called the cops and, immediately upon hearing Doug's voice, recognized him as someone she had recently dated.
It turns out that Doug, despite his British accent, had grown up in Australia, then lived in England and become a successful stock broker. He did well enough to give up his career and switch to photography. His parents and sisters still lived in Australia, and he had a group of tight buddies back in London, as well as friends in New York - all of whom he now saw as strangers. (The film skirts over the issue of his relationship with his dog: Did Doug have some recognition of dog? Or dog of the new Doug, whose manner had vastly changed?)
Murray had been part of Doug's circle in London, and, several months after the event, introduced himself and asked if he could film him remeeting his friends and family, relearning the history of the world, and re-experiencing everything for the first time. The project was greatly aided by the curious fact that Doug had started making a video diary shortly after the breach in his life, providing footage from those months before Murray arrived.
Just about now, you may be thinking that the video diary is a bit too convenient and that the whole thing smells like a fraud - something I was suspicious of at various points. But the impulse to video things makes sense as a response to the amnesia - as an attempt to create an electronic record to duplicate the one stored in our unreliable brains.
There are a few other reasons to be suspicious, not least among them that Doug (and all the women in the film) are a little too good-looking, as though they came from central casting. But by a third of the way through, most doubts are dispelled, partly because of a sense of the genuine, and partly because the whole thing ends too undramatically.
One of the reasons there have been so many amnesia thrillers is that, in addition to the inherent fascination of the concept, it provides an excuse to play with the narrative form itself. Continuity of memory defines both personal identity and the forward movement of time. Movies tend to be tied to an individual point of view, which, in the normal course of things, means that stories unfold in a staid chronological fashion. Amnesia, along with other nonstandard or unreal mental states (nightmares, hallucinations, various forms of psychosis or severe neurosis), destroy the coherent chronology of personal POV and allow the filmmaker all sorts of fun. He can be downright avant-garde and yet acceptable to Hollywood.
Following the rules of narrative, most such films give a sense of closure at the end: We find out what caused the amnesia (usually psychological trauma) and whether the protagonist is actually a killer (usually not). Things resolve cleanly. (Of course, this isn't always the case, as in Hitchcock's Vertigo, David Lynch's Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr., and Christopher Nolan's Memento.)
Expect no such neat resolution here. If anything, the story (as far as it has unfolded to date) does something more interesting: It questions whether such a resolution is possible ... or meaningful ... or even something to be wished for. About two-thirds through, Doug tells Murray, "The longer it goes, the less interested I am in my memory coming back. In fact, I'm apprehensive about it."
When asked about why she loves him, Narelle - his new "first love," who didn't know him before - jokes, "He doesn't have any faults ... yet." But later, in his absence, she worries, "I love his new self, but what if the old personality comes back?"
Doug has all sorts of misgivings. Because there's no organic explanation for his condition, it's assumed to be psychogenic: He worries that he might recover some traumatic memory. Or maybe he was simply miserable in his life and the "ability" to erase everything is, to put it in computer terms, a feature, not a bug: It allows him to start over.
Murray invokes computers explicitly: "He's become more articulate and sensitive from rebooting the system." Doug has to start seemingly from scratch with his photography, but in fact he relearns it very quickly, and his teacher thinks his work has improved, as though he's literally "seeing with new eyes."
Along the way, Murray - explicitly or implicitly - brings up innumerable issues that lie at the heart of identity, of time, of existence itself. Is identity determined by memories? How much is "pure us"? Who the hell really is each of us? The result is utterly gripping, always fascinating, and at times moving to the point of tears.
Published: 02/23/2006
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