Movie Review ~ Seeking Mavis Beacon

Mrs. Evie Swanson.  I’ll never forget that name because she was our teacher for “Keyboard,” a course in our coveted computer lab when I was in grade school.  Before we could play The Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, or Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, we had to pass Mrs. Swanson’s methodical Keyboard course.  Staring at that black screen with harsh green characters, I still hear her voice: “G….R….G….R.  Now, change to H…U….H….U.  Now, change to G…V…H…N.”  For someone who picked things up quickly and struggled with focusing, I was already blazing through full sentences and trying to make my friends laugh.  I’d often not notice Mrs. Swanson standing behind me until I could feel her spindly fingers on my shoulders as she announced to the class, “Joseph is again…typing too fast.”

This was the late ’80s, and another name likely stands out for those who grew up without a Mrs. Swanson: Mavis Beacon.  She was the poised typing tutor of computer labs, the face of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing that guided countless fingers across home rows and spacebars.  But was she ever a real person?  Mavis’s face certainly was, although the mystery around her appearance in the program and marketing materials was hazy. In Seeking Mavis Beacon, director Jazmin Jones and co-creator Olivia McKayla Ross explore this question in a genre-bending documentary that blurs the lines between myth and tech history.

Beginning as a quirky investigative documentary that plays like a true-crime podcast come to life, it transforms into a deeper exploration of Black women throughout our digital history.  The face of Mavis, a Haitian woman named Renée L’Espérance, was paid just $500 for her likeness in 1987, and after settling a later lawsuit with the company, she disappeared from public view, replaced by a vague composite. How an obscure software character was essentially erased from the record books may seem trivial to some, but its cultural significance raises larger questions of representation in this new era of virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa. 

Jones and Ross use a mixture of methods to track down L’Espérance, acting as “e-girl detectives” that pursue digital archives and conduct interviews with those involved with the original program design.  A playful visual style and charismatic narration set this apart from your traditional documentary, though it can stray into a conspiratorial tone that feels more personal than proven.  While the central mystery around L’Espérance and Mavis Beacon is engaging, the frequent shift to focus on the filmmakers themselves can slow the film’s pace, upsetting the delicate balance between their passion and our perspective.

Even with the occasional tangent, Seeking Mavis Beacon plays like an offbeat look into the ever-evolving ethics of technology and why Black women’s contributions to its history are so often ignored.  Mavis Beacon (the person and the program) are a distant memory to most, and by the end, Jones and Ross have left us with a moving reflection on how we think about the past and why forces beyond our control can shape those memories.  The filmmakers are telling us that we are responsible for correcting these oversights; now it’s our job to ensure these essential contributors aren’t forgotten.

(Mrs. Swanson, wherever you are, I still type too fast but rarely mess up the G/R/H/U keys.)