Unnerving tale of a spotless mind

It’s axiomatic to say truth is stranger than fiction, but sometimes the truth is so strange, so unnerving, so close to the terrifying edge of the unknown that it can be difficult to accept. That is the case with the deeply disturbing documentary “Unknown White Male.” Consider the questions asked by British filmmaker Rupert Murray at the film’s opening. “How much of our past lives makes us who we are? How much of who we are is determined by personal experiences? If they took our memories away, what would be left?”

These are not purely philosophical speculations; they come from Murray’s experience filming the story of his friend, 35-year-old Doug Bruce, a Brit living in New York who, without warning or apparent cause, suddenly found his memory wiped clean of every experience he’d ever had. Because this story is so profoundly disorienting, and because of the alternately gullible/skeptical times we live in (see JT LeRoy, James Frey, weapons of mass destruction), questions have been raised by everyone from Daily Variety (“Is ‘Male’ Just a Tall Tale?”) to Roger Ebert about whether the film is the truth or an artful fake.

But while the “is it or isn’t it” question suits contemporary culture, watching this film, even with a jaundiced eye, makes its veracity seem apparent. Bruce’s story, and the way he lives it before our eyes in several incarnations, makes this an unexpectedly emotional, continually disconcerting film.

The story begins on July 3, 2003, when a man was admitted to Brooklyn’s Coney Island Hospital after turning himself in to the New York police. Strikingly handsome and well-spoken, he had no idea who he was, where he lived or how he came to be in Brooklyn. According to Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychology professor and expert on memory interviewed in the film, this experience was “a particularly rare and bewildering type of retrograde amnesia,” a failure of episodic memory, the part of our mind that remembers what’s happened specifically to us.

Information in the man’s backpack led to acquaintances who identified him absolutely as Bruce, a former stockbroker who’d been so successful he was already retired. But Bruce himself remembered none of the people who knew him; his past, the film says, “belonged to everyone but him.” A video made six days after his episode shows a man who is frankly still alarmed by the memory of what being a complete unknown feels like. We tag along as Bruce meets a father, two sisters and old London friends, none of whom he remembers. Through later interviews, we can see how flabbergasting the experience was to all concerned, as sister Marina wonders if hugging the brother who does not know her would be an invasion of his personal space.

We also, through old home movies, get a glimpse of Bruce as he was before amnesia attacked him. This would be a cocky and arrogant individual who is different both from the frightened Bruce of the six-days-after video and the quieter, more tentative and reflective person that has emerged by the time a year or more has passed since his memory left him. British moral philosopher Mary Warnock, who was given a chance to view the “Unknown White Male” footage, says on camera that “he’s certainly the same man, but it’s questionable if he’s the same person.” As Bruce himself puts it, “I had the great opportunity to reinvent myself, to be a completely different person.” It’s perhaps the most positive way to view an experience that is not a problem to believe but difficult to envy.

*

‘Unknown White Male’

MPAA rating: Unrated

A Wellspring release. Director Rupert Murray. Producer Beadie Finzi. Cinematographer Orlando Stuart. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

At Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500; One Colorado, 42 Miller Alley, Pasadena, (626) 744-1224; University Town Center 6, 4245 Campus Drive, Irvine, (949) 854-8818.