“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…” — James Burton (Salon)