A Trip Down Memory Lane
By David Segal | Washington Post Staff Writer | Wednesday, March 22, 2006
NEW YORK
On the morning of July 3, 2003, a former stockbroker named Doug Bruce walked
into a police station in Coney Island and told the cops that he didn't know his name.
Without a wallet or identification, he'd awoken a few minutes earlier on a subway
train, befuddled but unharmed, with a case of what doctors call total retrograde
amnesia. He could form sentences without a problem, but remembered nothing of
his past and only patchy facts about the world.
He was checked into a nearby hospital, and a call was made to the only number that Bruce, then 35, had with him. It was
scrawled on a slip of pink paper found in his knapsack. He was retrieved by a friend and chaperoned home, which turned
out to be a gorgeous loft in downtown Manhattan with cockatoos and a dog. He has yet to regain his memory and is still
basically a blank slate, learning pop culture, sports, science, arts -- everything -- one day at a time.
That, at least, is the story told in "Unknown White Male," a documentary that opened Friday in Washington. The film
raises some fascinating philosophical stumpers about identity and love, but here's one question you won't hear in the
voice-over: Is this a film about a big, brazen lie? Is Doug Bruce -- there isn't a polite way to put this -- faking it?
It's impossible to know. If this is a fraud, part of its beauty is that it requires no accomplices. Unless Bruce submits to tests
that separate pretend amnesiacs from real ones -- tests that nobody in the movie even mentions, let alone asks him to take
-- his story can't be disproved.
Family and friends stand foursquare behind him, amazed that anyone would challenge his word. But a tantalizing pile of
circumstantial evidence suggests that the whole elaborate tale might be bunk. A leading amnesia expert believes Bruce's
story is without medical precedent. There is an inexplicable gap in his life story, and one episode that is either a stunning
coincidence or a credibility crusher. Bruce could be exactly what he claims to be -- or he could have found an ingenious
way to trade the cards he'd been dealt for a far more intriguing hand.
If that's what he had in mind, it worked. Soon after the Coney Island incident, Bruce became hipster Manhattan's answer
to the Elephant Man, an ingratiating medical marvel, except hunky and with an adorable British accent. A crowd of
accomplished artists, models and producers orbited in awe. He met the singer Bjork, the director Spike Jonze, the actor
Vincent D'Onofrio. He was invited to parties and dinners where he told his story pretty much nonstop. Everyone was
riveted.
Nearly everyone. Some listeners couldn't resist the suspicion that amnesia was Bruce's shtick.
"I remember meeting him at a bar with some mutual friends and he started telling this bartender the whole thing," recalls
Kishu Chand, a wardrobe stylist who works with photographers and film directors. "It was like he was searching for any
excuse to go into it, which just seemed weird to me. I remember asking a friend of mine afterward, 'Are you buying this?'
" Her doubts grew later that night, when Bruce handed over his e-mail address, which he told friends he'd registered just
days after the incident: unknownwhitemale@yahoo.com .
A Changed Man
Doug Bruce did a few interviews to help publicize the movie, but stopped recently and declined to speak for this story.
"He got singed," says Rupert Murray, the film's director and narrator, a friend of Bruce's for more than 15 years. He
started filming Bruce several months after the 2003 event, and he's behind the camera as Bruce retraces his day at Coney
Island Hospital and then visits London to meet old pals. "Unknown White Male" is Murray's first full-length documentary
and his big break. It's also sort of his nightmare.
He and Bruce feel burned by the skeptical press already generated by the movie, including a short piece in GQ magazine
quoting director Michel Gondry (of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" fame) saying that he met Bruce and thought
him a phony. Murray is sitting in a conference room in the Manhattan offices of Wellspring, the movie's distributor. He
doesn't seem to be having any fun.
"I was telling his story," he says at one point. "Not your story, not the story of a journalist. The story of a friend, and I
don't have to [freaking] prove anything to anyone."
Murray would walk out of this interview in a low-boil rage about 20 minutes later, with the cinematic exit line, "I am not a
[freaking] sociopath." (He was dismissing the possibility that he and Bruce cooked up the whole thing together.) When he
calls to apologize the next day, he says he's simply tired of questions about the truth of "Unknown White Male."
So, it seems, are Bruce's many supporters.
"I really want to be explicit," says Stephen Frailey, who heads the photography department at the School of Visual Arts,
where Bruce was enrolled before and after the alleged incident. "I believe completely in this event. I watched people go
up to Doug after it happened and say hello, people he knew, and he just looked blank. You could see it in his eyes. He was
completely lost."
In the movie and in phone interviews, friends and family say that the pre-amnesia Bruce was a slightly arrogant, hardedged cynic, and had been his whole life. Raised in Nigeria, where his father managed a series of businesses, and
educated at a boarding school in England, he'd dropped out of college in his twenties and apparently earned millions in
Paris courtesy of the stock market. In 1999, he retired from the
business world, moved to Manhattan and enrolled in a four-year course in photography.
"He seemed like this typical kind of total Eurotrash banker dude," says Nadine Adamson, the woman who claimed Bruce
at Coney Island Hospital. "He was chasing models, had this big loft, 'let's go to Biarritz.' For a few seconds, it was
appealing."
The pair had gone out a few times before the alleged incident, while she was living at her mom's place. (The number in
Bruce's knapsack was for Adamson's mother.) Uninterested, Adamson stopped returning Bruce's calls. But once beckoned
to the hospital that day in July, she helped ease Bruce back into the world. Adamson's pals thought she was getting
hoodwinked by a guy who wanted a second shot at bedding her, but she says they kept it platonic.
"He didn't know his way around his own apartment," says Adamson, who now lives in London and remains a firm
believer in Bruce. "It was like dealing with a child. He lost a lot of his cockiness. He became nicer."
This is a refrain you hear often: Bruce's story must be real because he is transformed. Word spread about this beatific
man-child who was discovering chocolate mousse, rock-and-roll, cinema and history all over again. He claimed to have
lost episodic memory (the story of his life), as well as much of his semantic memory (knowledge of the world), while
retaining most procedural memory (the ability to swim, for instance). Bruce could use chopsticks, but he couldn't
remember eating sushi, and said he had a weird jumble of facts at his disposal. He knew the names of some cities in
Australia, for instance, but nothing about the attacks of 9/11.
Adamson introduced him to a friend named Richard Brown, a British film producer who lives in Manhattan, and the two
became friends. Within days, Brown was interviewing Bruce on video; about eight minutes of that footage appears in the
movie. He introduced his subject to a rarefied stratum of pals and acquaintances in the film and music industries. Even
among celebrities, at any dinner or gathering where the story came up, Bruce took center stage.
And the story, it seems, always came up. Bruce would inevitably stammer something like, "I'm sorry, who is Bono?" and,
bingo, he was off and running. It wasn't just a fantastic tale. As a man apparently reborn to his senses, Bruce would
profess amazement at the mundane in ways that humbled and touched his listeners. He had an almost mystical charisma.
“He would listen intently to every syllable you said, even if you were just describing how to cook an egg," says Chris
Doyle, the acclaimed cinematographer of films such as "Hero" and "Rabbit-Proof Fence," who dined with Bruce on five
or six occasions. "Most of us, we want that sort of wonder in our lives and we rarely experience it."
But eventually, there were doubters. "At first, Doug was very believable and fascinating to be around, but at the same
time, there were apparent inconsistencies," says Brown, who quit videotaping Bruce. "On one hand, he had to ask who
George Bush was, but on the other, he could hold nuanced conversations about Middle Eastern politics. He would always
preface such conversations with the disclaimer, 'I don't know but I've been told,' yet he had an incredible command of the
facts and an extremely perceptive insight, and after a few weeks I started to have doubts about the veracity of his story."
Others realized that Bruce seemed to relish his condition. Some friends swear he was hesitant to share his extraordinary
tale, but when he posted a profile of himself on Friendster, a Web site dedicated to social networking, it sure sounded like
he was working it.
His page is still up, complete with photos of himself and his cockatoos. In the "About Me" section, he's written, "mmmm .
. . i have the perceptiveness of a 35 yrd old with the naievety and vulnerability of a 3 month old infant. (but am growing
up fast!!!)" Under "Who I want to meet," he wrote, "the person who banged me on the head and stole my memory."
Under occupation, he wrote "fugal amnesiac."
No Explanation
Amnesia -- fugal and otherwise -- is rampant in soap operas but rare in the real world. Most cases involve accidents
followed by a few seconds or minutes of memory loss. Total retrograde amnesia is quite rare, and the number of cases that
last more than a few days is tiny.
Hans Markowitsch, a neural psychologist and professor at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, has studied dozens of
examples of total retrograde amnesia. Every one that he's encountered or read about can be traced to severe mental or
physical trauma.
"Even when the patient has no idea what that trauma is, if you dig around long enough, you find it," says Markowitsch on
the phone. In "Unknown White Male," a Harvard psychology professor gives a primer on amnesia, but the only
physiological explanation floated for Bruce's memory loss is an MRI that shows a small congenital tumor on his pituitary
gland. There were also three small bumps on his head the day he walked into the police station. The only psychotraumatic
explanation hinted at is the death of Bruce's mother, though that happened years ago. It's possible that some combination
of these factors accounts for his amnesia, but the doctors in the movie doubt it, and even Murray concludes before the
credits roll that no amount of testing or consultations can solve the mystery of Bruce's condition.
Which technically isn't true. With a functional MRI, or fMRI, the truth of an amnesiac's claims can be put to a test. When
confronted with questions about their past, there is a distinct pattern in the right frontal part of the brain in subjects who
remember personal events, which an fMRI will pick up. Given that medical science was stumped, why not test for fakery?
"Then he wouldn't have made the film," snaps Murray, a little indignantly. "How would you explain to your friend, he's
just about to make a documentary, 'Before we start [would you take an fMRI?]' It's just rude."
To Markowitsch, the absence of any plausible trigger makes Bruce's story more than just suspicious. "Total retrograde
amnesia doesn't happen out of nothing," he says. "I can't imagine that this story is true."
What the Film Left Out
If Bruce did invent this whole episode, where did he get the idea? Take your pick of movies -- anything from "Regarding
Henry" to "50 First Dates." But it's also possible he lifted the concept from a friend. In a coincidence that defies Lotto-size
odds, Bruce knew a man in Paris who suffered a weeklong bout of severe amnesia and used the ordeal to rethink his life.
According to a former girlfriend, who remains close to Bruce and is convinced he is telling the truth, a friend had an onfield collision during a pickup soccer game, landing him in the hospital without any identification and no memory of his
life. His family thought he was dead, until they scoured area hospitals and found him.
It's not in the movie, but Bruce mentions this episode during the videotaped interviews shot a few days after the alleged
onset of amnesia. In a copy obtained by The Washington Post, Bruce says the friend set aside his hard-charging business
career and moved to either Bali or Thailand, where he learned to give massages. "And now he heals people," Bruce
whispers.
During those same interviews, Bruce also seems to commit a rare gaffe. He says it was raining the morning he walked into
the Coney Island police department. A couple days later, while sitting in his apartment and being interviewed, he says that
he'd taken a walk a day earlier and seen a breathtaking summer storm. "It was the first time," he mutters, choking up, "that
I had ever seen rain."
A more curious filmmaker would surely have quizzed Bruce about this contradiction, and perhaps asked a follow-up or
two about that soccer accident. There are also mysteries the film doesn't touch, including a weird blank patch during the
years that Bruce made his fortune in Paris. Everyone contacted for this story said either that they didn't know how he
made that money or wouldn't say.
Why this is a mystery is itself a mystery, but it is a conspicuous obstacle to sifting through Bruce's past, and it produced
this head-scratcher of an answer from Murray. "Somebody told [Bruce] the name of the firm, but he forgot it. When I
asked him about it recently, he said he thought it started with an 'L.' Lllllllle something."
True or False
If Bruce's story is a hoax, it is so finely constructed and executed that in some perverse way it deserves a round of
applause. Think about it. In the span of days, he may well have devised a cost-free way to upgrade his life, from
anonymous student to legendary curiosity.
According to friends, Bruce's life pre-amnesia was hardly miserable, but he was trolling for dates on the Internet and
communing with a crowd far less glamorous than the one he wound up in. Today, he's dating a knockout of a model -- she
appears in the movie and calls him a man without flaws -- and he has a ready-made excuse to break with anyone in his
previous life he doesn't consider up to scratch.
"There are good friends that I've had in the past who, I've met them and I just don't get them," Bruce says at one point in
the film, sounding like Old School Bruce. "I don't feel it, and so I don't hang out with them, which for them is tough."
Bruce's scheme, if it is one, is also arguably superior to those highly publicized frauds who have been exposed in recent
weeks. Unlike the case of James Frey, of "A Million Little Pieces" infamy, there's no one who can step forward and say,
"This didn't happen." (This assumes nobody else is in on it.) Unlike Laura Albert, who invented a novel-writing alter ego
named JT LeRoy, a character supposedly many years younger and male, Bruce doesn't need a co-conspirator to handle
interviews and appear in public. At least until recently, when he started feeling "singed," he could enjoy the upside with a
minimum fear of exposure.
It's possible that Bruce had a movie and national fame in mind from the start, and it's possible, too, that he's been aided by
any number of allies. But if this is a charade, it could have started with modest ambitions, and as his character caught on,
he just ran with it. Where was the danger? If things got hairy -- if he truly found himself stranded in that hospital, or
tripped up at a cocktail party -- at any moment Bruce could just say, "I'm back! I remember everything!" and that would
end it.
Of course, fraud or not, one imagines this whole affair was brutal, at least for a while, on Bruce's father and two sisters.
And if it's a scam and Murray is not part of it, Bruce put a buddy's career in serious jeopardy.
But others found "doe-eyed Doug," as some called him, uplifting in an almost spiritual way. He brought joy to the jaded
and if all of it was merely a performance, well, the guy should take a bow.
"The effect that Bruce had on everyone around him was exactly the effect that great art aspires to," says Chris Doyle, the
cinematographer, "the effect that I want whenever I make a movie. He opened your eyes to things you didn't know."