Amnesia's Allure

Amnesia is screenwriting's ultimate cliche, deployed in classics such as Spellbound and The Great Dictator. The Screenwriters Guild went so far as to prohibit amnesia as a plot device. (That didn't stop the makers of The Muppets Take Manhattan and Nunsense 2.)

But true-life tales of memory loss don't offer just drama—they also shed light on the mysteries of identity and personality. Unknown White Male, a documentary which indulges our fascination with total amnesia, tells the story of Doug Bruce, a handsome 33-year-old New York City banker who lands in a Coney Island hospital without any idea of who he is. Filmmaker Rupert Murray, a childhood friend, deftly portrays Bruce's struggle with severe retrograde amnesia, a condition that left his vocabulary, general knowledge of the world and ability to form new memories mostly intact but robbed him of all past personal recollections, from the taste of ice cream to his mother's name. The film leaves open the question of whether Bruce's malady is the result of brain damage or a psychological breakdown.

Amnesia triggered by psychological distress occurs in less than 1 percent of psychiatric patients, says Daniel Schacter, chair of the psychology department at Harvard University. Far more frequent is anterograde amnesia, or the impaired ability to form new memories that is typical of Alzheimer's and head injury patients.

Case studies of psychogenic amnesiacs are stranger than anything Hollywood could conjure. Schacter describes a 53-year-old man, known as "K," who, during a period of intense job-related stress, suddenly remembered nothing in his life after the age of 14, the year he was hit in the head with a baseball bat. Another patient, a young Canadian man, lost most of his autobiographical memory while attending the funeral of his beloved grandfather, only to regain it a few days later while watching a cremation scene in Shogun.

If Bruce's amnesia is psychogenic, Schacter expects that he will regain his memories. Meanwhile, Murray and others are getting used to the "new" Doug, who is now, by all accounts, a more thoughtful and less arrogant man.