Mavis Beacon is the proud, kind, capable Black woman who’s the face of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, the typing program that ushered so many people into the digital age. The way director Jazmin Jones sees it, Mavis Beacon belongs on any list of the most important Black women in modern history, and her reasoning is sound. Indeed, one of the successes of Seeking Mavis Beacon is its emphasis on just how many people would never have found a foothold in the 21st century if not for Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. That feels like enough to qualify Mavis Beacon for many an honorific. That is, if the woman were actually real.
Turns out, Mavis Beacon is a mascot character crafted by the three men who developed the typing program. The model for Mavis is a very real Haitian immigrant named Renée L’Espérance, who was paid $500 for her likeness before falling off the grid. And in an age where the very concept of rich white men owning a person’s physical image in perpetuity for pennies is a hot-button topic, emphasizing the existence and personhood of one of the world’s most famous faces feels like an act of heroism. That heroism, though, appears to be beyond the reach of Jones and producer Olivia Mckayla Ross, given the way Seeking Mavis Beacon meanders its way toward its goal with a maddening lack of focus and narrative thrust.
Jones and Ross are an interesting pair of detectives. Both are Black and nerdy, and their investigation comes from a place of trying to track down an unsung hero in Black history, for being an icon of Black representation in technology. That investment in giving Mavis Beacon her flowers grounds the film effortlessly early on. But that ground gives way not long after, as Seeking Mavis Beacon begins to follow too many tangents, bombarding us with TikTok videos, memes, and recontextualized videos in a way that feels like the filmmakers are more concerned with reveling in the internet’s mania than moving their investigation along.
One of the harder-hitting stretches of the film does rather diligent work pointing out just how many new developments in technology often rely on people of color to shepherd rich white people into proficiency, only to subsequently make that technology unobtainable for anyone but rich white folks. But, again, the film proves itself incapable of or unwilling to follow through on those ideas to an ultimate conclusion, most often abruptly switching to Jones and Ross’s mounting struggles with their office mates or staying in college courses. At one point, we watch as they semi-jokingly participate in séances to determine if L’Espérance is actually dead.
There are big breaks here, among them the unreliable narrative of one of the typing program’s creators, contact with L’Espérance’s neighbors, and the discovery of a Facebook group for ex-employees from Mindscape, the developer of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. But so much of the film feels like it’s stalling for time and proving academic bona fides on its way to an anticlimax that would almost be poignant if Jones and Ross had more accessibly digested its implications.
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