NEW MAN.(The Talk of the Town)(Unknown White Male)(Movie review)

At 9 a.m. on July 3, 2003, Doug Bruce woke up on the F train near Coney Island. He had no idea who or where he was. There was a swimsuit in his knapsack, but it was cool and rainy out. He knew what cars were, but he could not identify specific hood ornaments; he could sign his name--a left-handed scrawl--but he was able to decipher only the "D." His scalp was covered with bumps and cuts, and he had a pounding headache. Two days later, recalling that morning, he wrote, "I go to a shop and buy some water. I'm cold and wet. I'm afraid I have committed a crime." Bruce was suffering from a rare condition known as total retrograde amnesia. All his memories had vanished, and his syntax seemed stuck in the present tense.

Eventually, a Coney Island policeman determined that the polite, terrified stranger with the British accent was Doug Bruce, a thirty-five-year-old resident of Greenwich Village. An unfamiliar friend took Bruce home to his equally unfamiliar loft, and he began trying to relearn who he was. A well-travelled stockbroker who had quit a few years earlier to pursue photography, Bruce discovered that procedural skills, such as handling a camera and surfing, came back readily; the rest remained a void. When an English friend e-mailed that he wanted to help Bruce regain his love for West Indian cricket, Bruce replied, "Is it a drink, or some kind of insect?" And, inquire as he might, he could find no one who knew what had happened to him that July 2nd.

Bruce's ordeal is the subject of a documentary made by an old friend, "Unknown White Male," which opens this week. One afternoon recently, Bruce sat at a pub on West Thirty-third Street, warming his hands around a cup of tea. An inquisitive, sweet-tempered man with wide green eyes, he never stopped smiling. Across the street was the Empire State Building, the next stop on his whirlwind tour of everything. In the past two and a half years, he has experienced the novel joys of blueberries, fireworks, the ocean, and Fellini's "8 1/2," which he saw twice in a row. On his first flight, to Paris, he stayed up all night watching the tiny airplane symbol on his seat-back video screen cross the Atlantic.

"I just found out today about 'Miami Vice'--do you know what that is?" he asked. "Apparently, in the eighties it was the show that defined how men should dress, although some people thought it was super-cheesy." Sounds about right. "Since the accident, I feel a childlike--or what I imagine to be a childlike--wonder at new experiences, but also an analytical understanding," he ...