After the skeletal remains of 38-year-old Joyce Carol Vincent were discovered in her grim, out-of-the-way British flat in January 2006, her death and life were turned into cautionary tales by essayists and commentators around the globe. Her time of death was established as December 2003 (wrapping paper and Christmas gifts surrounded her); her decomposing body had sat for three years in front of a TV set that was still blaring when her remains were found. In the three years between her death and the discovery of her body, no one – not family or friends – had filed a missing person report or seemingly even noticed that she wasn’t around. She immediately became the poster woman for 21st century disconnectedness, with technology and our collective fast-paced but navel-gazing lives named as culprits.
The 2011 documentary Dreams of a Life, directed by Carol Morley, attempts to flesh out Vincent’s life, to figure out how a beautiful, vivacious young women became anonymous, non-descript – how someone with such promise came to not only blend in with the rest of us ordinary folk but to sink into anonymity.
The documentary is largely made up of dramatic reenactments of Vincent’s life – her singing into a hairbrush as a child; working at an office desk as an adult; hanging out with friends; singing along to records as a lonely young woman; dancing in a club. At one point, the dusty, cobweb covered television that sits in Vincent’s recreated final apartment plays a reenactment of a moment from her childhood. With actress Zawe Ashton thoughtfully and engagingly portraying adult Vincent, these bits build to a moving emotional payoff. In between are clips of interviews with friends, old roommates, and a couple of boyfriends. Most of those sharing into the camera are still in disbelief that the woman they knew but fell out contact with could have come to such an inglorious end – with stops in a shelter for abused women, and a hospital stay for the same abuse, along the way. None of her surviving family (four sisters) appears at all, having declined the offer to be in the film.
Most of the tendered recollections are exactly what you hear in newscasts after someone dies – she was so beautiful, she was so friendly, she was amazing… But as the film progresses, cracks in that perfection appear: Vincent’s mood swings and emotional darkness; intimations of childhood abuse; her inability to fully trust anyone; her struggles around her racial identity; the malleability of her interests and personality when in a relationship; her estrangement from her family. And while most of those speaking are dumbfounded at her fate, one former boyfriend, musician and producer Alistair Abrahams, says somberly, “Joyce died alone because she wanted to be alone.”
A recurring thread in the film is Vincent’s desire to be a singer. From created scenes of young Joyce singing for her family’s entertainment to wrenching moments of her as an adult singing along to an old 45, to reenactments of her in a recording booth laying down tracks, music as a character and force in Vincent’s life is well established. Through Abrahams, she was able to meet music figures like Jimmy Cliff, Betty Wright and Gil Scott-Heron, who reportedly told Vincent, “A pessimist is the guy who’s in possession of the full facts.” And person after person speaks of her dream of singing stardom, with a few comparing her vocals to Whitney Houston. Only Abrahams steps away from the party line and says she wasn’t really that good.
What’s most interesting in the conversation about Vincent’s career dreams, though, is Abrahams’ insistence that she had no ambition at all, really. That doesn’t necessarily contradict the consensus that she wanted to be a singer. Wanting to be something but actually having the drive to be it, to do the work of being it, are not synonymous. But what does the creative impulse look like when the person harboring it has neither center nor foundation? With what do you create yourself, let alone any sort of art when there’s no there, there – for whatever reason?
Undoubtedly, a lot of art has been created because of the pressing desire to fill that void, to pull something of substance and meaning from the blankness. Dreams of a Life is a a film that finds its mysterious, never-really-solved central figure wrestling with issues around race, gender, class, sexuality, ambition (or lack of), and basic knowledge of self. The title works as a description of all the stories and assumptions about Vincent that friends and acquaintances share, but also as a commentary on Vincent’s internal landscape and possible longings.
