Seeking Mavis Beacon Review

Do you remember those penguins? If you’re of a certain age, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing may well have been formative for you. Launched in 1987, the instructional software programme had sold over 6 million copies by 1999, and was still releasing new editions as recently as 2021. People all over the world owe their ability to type to Mavis Beacon – who groundbreakingly for the era the programme was created, was a Black woman.

Mavis Beacon was a particularly important figure to young Black women like director Jazmin Jones and her collaborator Olivia McKayla Ross, not used to seeing people who looked like them in such a popular position of authority. The thing is, ‘Mavis Beacon’ was never actually a real person, but the invention of three white men; she was played on the promotional artwork by the Haitian-born model, Renée L’Espérance. In Seeking Mavis Beacon, Jones and Ross investigate the origin story of the fictional typing icon, and try and find the elusive L’Espérance to ask what the whole experience of (sort of) fame was like for her.

Jones and Ross, who deem themselves ‘e-girl detectives’, take us on quite an odyssey. It’s an odyssey with a lot of tangents and dead ends, sure; there are a few occasions when it’s difficult to work out why they are interviewing the people they interview. Nevertheless, though their film is a little scattershot in approach, the pair never seem to be losing control of their overall vision, with their energy and stylistic flourishes (the concept of presenting background information as various open tabs on a computer screen is a particularly great one) keeping things constantly moving in the right direction.

And a lot of the conversations they have are illuminating. Jones goes to interview the two surviving of the three men who invented the Mavis Beacon software. It proves a fascinating encounter with deceptions on both sides – Jones playing down her disapproval about the way the men used L’Espérance’s image without giving her adequate compensation, and the men hiding from Jones a legal battle they had with the model, that the e-girl detectives later find out about anyway. While Seeking Mavis Beacon is in general presented in fairly relaxed, freewheeling style, that sequence is like something from a bonafide conspiracy thriller.

For the most part however, unlike fictional detectives hunting for clues, the journey of Jones and Ross raises far more questions than it does answers. Why is it that these anthropomorphised pieces of helpful technology – besides Mavis Beacon, there’s Alexa, Siri, Cortana… – are always female? How much of what those men tell Jones are active lies, and how much can be put down to the fallibility of memory? Was L’Espérance shafted by the men who used her image? What if she doesn’t want to be found?

Rather than being frustrating, the lack of concrete resolutions makes Seeking Mavis Beacon all the more engaging, inviting the audience along as active participants on the thought-provoking journey.

★★★★