Seeking Mavis Beacon: Image is Everything in Uneven Documentary

By Liz Braun

Rating: B+

Seeking Mavis Beacon starts off as one thing and then becomes another, overall a chaotic but intriguing journey about art, identity and history in cyberspace … where everything lasts forever.

The movie begins with an amusing disclaimer about the use of fakes, dissembling, myth and fantasy, and then delivers an inventive, somewhat shambolic mix of reality and fiction.

Director Jazmin Jones and her colleague, tech wiz Olivia McKayla Ross set out to find the real woman behind an image on a late-80s game called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.

(Prior to home computers, touch-typing was the bailiwick of secretaries — women, in other words — and was regarded accordingly. Things changed once everyone had to learn the QWERTY board to be efficient on a computer. Typing, re-christened keyboarding, became valuable knowledge.)

The software program Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing was hugely successful and became a symbol of the new computer age. “Mavis Beacon” was pictured on the packaging as a confident, smiling Black woman in a business suit, and she became an icon of representation.

Jones and Ross set out in Seeking Mavis Beacon to discover more about the real woman behind the image. One of the things they do to help their search is set up a hotline where people can talk about Mavis Beacon, and that proves to be a fascinating collection of memories from people for whom Mavis Beacon and her typing lessons were crucial to both racial pride and work success.

After some sleuthing, Jones and Ross discover that the woman behind Mavis Beacon is Renee L’Esperance, a Haitian model alleged to have moved back to the Caribbean. Nothing had been written about L’Esperance in 26 years when the women went looking for her.

Then the filmmakers encounter the three white computer guys who created the software — and Mavis Beacon — and they learn how the men discovered L’Esperance behind the perfume counter at Saks.

At least, that’s one version of the story. Artist Stephanie Dinkins appears in the film to talk about how Black people are being depicted in technologies being developed mostly by white men. She also examines the supportive, teaching role Mavis Beacon inhabits — leading others to success but never superseding them. These are some of the ideas introduced in the film that a viewer wishes were more thoroughly investigated.

What’s certain is that L’Esperance was paid a one-time fee of $500 for embodying Mavis Beacon. Everybody else involved in the game made millions.

As Seeking Mavis Beacon unfolds, Jones and Ross reveal as much about themselves as they do anything else, and they are both great creative company. While the third act flags, the movie is mostly a high-energy investigation of race, gender, and identity in the digital age, not to mention what privacy looks like in a world where a version of all our lives is led, via social media, in full public view.

The pursuit of Mavis Beacon — named for music goddess Mavis Staples, with the obvious guiding light meaning of “beacon” as a surname — is the movie here, rather than the capture. You know the rule: never meet your idols. This is a film about how we live now, in an ever-changing relationship with truth and technology.

Seeking Mavis Beacon. Written and directed by Jazmin Jones. With Jazmin Jones, Olivia McKayla Ross, Mandy Harris Williams, Stephanie Dinkins, and Walt Bilofsky. In theatres September 27.