PHILADELPHIA — Do you remember who taught you to type on a desktop QWERTY keyboard? There’s a chance it may have been the fictional character Mavis Beacon, a made-up entity from the popular education software game Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing released in 1987. Despite the fervor that followed the software through multiple editions, the story of the real woman who portrayed Mavis Beacon remained hazy and untraceable until director Jazmin R. Jones and computer programmer Olivia McKayla Ross joined forces for a new documentary.
Seeking Mavis Beacon (2024), a feature documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and recently screened at BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, follows Jones and Ross as they meander through multiple avenues in search of the elusive model whose image represents one of the most iconic education software personas to date. Jones, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and archivist, credits her interest in technology to Mavis Beacon’s guidance as a child, recalling that she and many others regarded the teacher as a nurturing and engaging Black character with a special ability to connect with the African-American community among other demographics. Ross grew up with unsupervised web access throughout the early aughts and quickly developed an interest in cybersecurity and programming.
The collaborators embark on a twisting journey to locate the model, a Haitian woman named Renée L’Espérance who has left virtually no trace of her existence. Throughout the film, the pair exhaust nearly every available resource in an effort to find out more about L’Espérance, including but not limited to awkward meetings with the Software Toolworks developers and their affiliates, invoking the help of a psychic medium, and showing up to the L’Espérance’s last-known addresses to field neighbors for information.
It’s revealed in cheerfully micro-aggressive interviews that the software developers (a group of White men) reportedly discovered L’Espérance while she was working at a department store perfume counter in the mid- to late-’80s. They waxed poetic about her ethereal beauty and charisma, the length of her fingernails, and how she allegedly asked them what a computer was when they presented her with the opportunity to model, but they also remained tight-lipped on what became of her afterward. L’Espérance was only paid $500 for her image to be used for a game series that sold six million copies between 1987 and 1998 alone.
As the documentary persists and the pair inch closer toward discovering L’Espérance, Jones and Ross find themselves grappling with the potential reality that she simply does not want to be found.
“At the start of this film, I was very-open hearted and quite naive as a filmmaker to run with the belief of, ‘Oh my gosh, the only reason Renée hasn’t spoken publicly is because the right person hasn’t come and asked her the right way,’” Jones told Hyperallergic following the BlackStar screening, hoping that a real relationship might sprout from this investigation.
When asked about how her own experience of presenting herself for a film might intersect with or diverge from that of L’Espérance for Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, Jones said she began to understand the “extractive” nature of the process after having a camera crew follow her closely for years. There are points throughout the documentary where we see how Jones is mistreated and experiences micro-aggressions as a Black woman as well.
“Even if I’m directing [the filming] in my house with my partner shooting it, I had to just sit with the weight of knowing that whatever I do now could be locked into history forever,” she noted. “I realized that no matter how much agency you have in the process, it’s also an uncomfortable process.”
More candid than most investigative documentaries, the film is set up as if viewers are watching a mid-web era desktop projection, with a user opening multiple files ranging from documentary footage of Jones and Ross to related memes along with viral pop-culture moments and content by prominent Black creators. It also features incisive commentary about digital agency, gender, race, artificial intelligence, and cyberspace from transdisciplinary artist Stephanie Dinkins and Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) author Legacy Russell.
Seeking Mavis Beacon is screening for free tomorrow evening, August 10, at the New Design High School in Lower Manhattan through Rooftop Films before it hits select theaters nationwide at the end of this month.
