Unknown White Male (2005)

Further thoughts...

After his debut feature Unknown White Male finished its special, pre-release screening at Newcastle’s Tyneside Cinema this week, Rupert Murray took part in a Q&A session with his audience. The first member of the audience to say anything proved eager to announce his opinion of the film he’d just sat through. “I think the whole thing’s a scam!” he shouts, notepad and pen in hand, into the microphone. It was a seemingly genuine remark, and, with his neighbour nodding in scathing agreement, kicked off some controversy and gasp. The problem these two devil’s advocates had, it seemed, was that Murray’s documentary was questionable in its ethics (the exploitation of a possible victim of a traumatic event); they saw Bruce’s clear wealth, and decision to film the early stages of his new life and integration back into society, via video-diary format, as highly implausible.

At one point in the film, Doug, having rediscovered a love for photography, gets behind a camera as if to capture a pic of the audience sitting in the cinema. It echoes a similar shot in the opening credits of Godard’s Le mépris (1963), in which a cinematographer slowly pans his camera to the viewer, and thus breaking the barrier between the reality of the audience and the fiction of what it is watching. It is Godard playing the usual tricks with his audience, at once subtle and strangely discomforting, shattering the illusion of reality, and it would not come as a surprise to find Murray is, in his own film, consciously winking at the nouvelle vague veteran. This is not, after all, a film which sits comfortably under the term “documentary”. It is of course promoted as one, but it is in fact far too indulgent to count as a document of objective information. Even its tagline, “If you lost your memory would you want it back?”, suggests a kind of fictional premise not far removed from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).

It sits, instead, more easily as an Herzogian affair, treading the thin boundaries between external truth and internal expression, an aesthetic response to objective facts. It is at once a collaboration with, celebration of, and even exploitation of, its subject, who, in the case of Murray’s film, the director has known for many years, and with whom he has had to reconnect afresh since the amnesia took effect. Indeed, Doug is the kind of hero Herzog would thrive on: a not entirely likeable character but charming all the same, a man torn between his achievements and desires, his past and his future, and psychologically riveting, if only because of his affliction—without it, there’d be no film. Parallels are not difficult to draw up between Murray’s hero and Kaspar Hauser; and, like Herzog’s enigmatic character study, Unknown White Male touches upon a wider social context, subtly commenting on the way Doug is treated when initially received by the Coney Island police and hospital, as if using its primary subject to expose the underlying message of the film: that we all need a memory check and wake up to rediscover the world and appreciate it once more—not least of all, perhaps, the very kind of viewer who would denounce it as a scam.

In this way, Murray’s effort is teasingly ambiguous as to what it is actually “about”. Of course, the amnesiac at its centre, the freak in the jar, is the most obvious answer. But what of Murray, who, like Herzog, often takes centre stage himself? Or, as said, the wider social critique? The ultimate celebration of the natural world (Doug telling of his “first” encounter with the ocean, and finding he can instinctively swim, is genuinely touching)? And what of, coming back to that Godard reference, the audience? This seems, after all, especially—quite fittingly—in retrospect, a fascinating exploration between author, subject and audience. And while Murray denied in the Q&A session that he had any higher ambitions other than a sort of home-movie document for Doug and his old and new friends, Unknown White Male is also a provoking article on memory, loss and optimism. It is this universality, not particularly Doug’s case, which will perhaps allow many to connect with the film.

These thoughts stand regardless of whether or not the film is authentic; this reviewer has deliberately refrained from taking sides in the debate, though I must say that during the Q&A session, I was quick to defend the film against the cynics attacking it, my argument being that their questions weren’t really necessary. Tellingly, they left well before the end. And if those cynics turned out to be correct in their assumptions about the film being a hoax? Then Murray, not unlike Godard, may have made a film whose core proves even more admirable than its surface already is.