“Warning: The following feature film and its component parts contain deep-fakes and fabulation, deceptiveness and duplicity, appropriation and recontextualization, transformation, manipulation, and conversion. The resulting work is utterly subjective, individually crafted, and completely faithful to the experience of its authors and their respective algorithms.”
That caution opens first-person documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon, and it’s maybe the filmmakers’ cleverest move, in a film not lacking in daring or smarts. It sets the table for the tech and academic jargon to come, and writes a blank check of sorts (co-signed with a quick cut to Orson Welles’ plays-with-the-facts F for Fake). Strap in, it urges, because this movie is going to some wild places.
The thesis is straightforward enough, wherein filmmaker Jazmin Jones and a colleague, a teenage coder named Olivia McKayla Ross, seek to find the woman who was once the face of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, a hugely popular instructional computer software launched in 1987. Contrary to popular opinion, Mavis Beacon wasn’t a real person. Jones likens her to the “Aunt Jemima of technology” – a fictional figure, a marketing construct, who nevertheless had a tremendous impact as a Black-skinned woman representing authority and expertise to millions of users. Made-up, yes, but portrayed by a very real woman, Renée L’Espérance, who Jones and Ross are committed to tracking down and giving her just dues.
Seeking Mavis Beacon is a dizzying product of our digital age. In its look and energy, which uses a desktop screen as an aesthetic and organizational device, the zigzagging film can have the feel of too many browser tabs open, emblematic of its wide-ranging but sometimes under-explored topics of interest. Inspired by interviews with coders, conceptual artists, and internet academics, those topics include representation, developer and A.I. bias, and the ethics of looking for someone who doesn’t necessarily want to be found.
That last one is really intriguing. Channeling the home-sleuth trend that has turned the true crime genre into big business, Jones and Ross throw themselves full-bodied, for the camera, into the detective act. (There’s even an investigations board that gets dramatically set on fire.) Jarringly, a scene discussing consent contrasts a later scene in which the duo arrives uninvited at 10:30pm with a camera crew to a potential interviewee’s house. Jones in particular seems so canny about perception and responsibility, her actions here are befuddling.
The novelty of the doc’s so-much-muchness wears off – it could use a tighter edit – but still: Jones and her team have crafted a rather thrilling metanarrative in their search for Mavis, and Renée. Seeking a woman denied a voice, Jones has made herself the star of her own film, doing all sorts of things, like roller skating and consulting a tarot reader, that will make doc purists clutch their pearls, a sidelong pleasure of the piece. She couldn’t be more explicit about who is controlling the narrative here – subtext made text – even if Renée, in her way, is the one with the last word.
This article appears in September 13 • 2024.
