BBefore typing emails and text messages with your fingers became an accepted form of communication, typing was an entirely manual skill. In the 1980s, “the office” was the preserve of geeks who could type 40 words per minute. at leastThose who are too modest or stingy to sign up for in-person classes can purchase a software program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for $50. At my Catholic high school, the app was Typing class. The priests have just turned on the computers.
Released in late 1987, Mavis Beacon quickly assumed a place of honor on home PC desktops among the floppy disks for SimCity and After darkAmong other features, Mavis gamified typing exercises and tracked typing progress in minute detail. Its most distinctive feature was the elegant black woman in a cream-colored suit and a short, slicked-back haircut marching proudly to her job in a skyscraper on the software package’s cover. But it would take a few more decades for the most important lesson to be learned about the dangers of ceding control over one’s image and likeness to corporate interests.
A new documentary, Seeking Mavis Beacon, not only highlights that lesson, but has forced the filmmakers to grapple with the irony of even trying. “Now that the film is finished,” says first-time director Jazmin Renée Jones, “I’m trying to protect her and her privacy.”
Seeking Mavis Beacon, which premieres at Sundance, plays out like another classic PC game: Where is Carmen Sandiego? Jones and producer Olivia McKayla Ross embarked on a journey to find the woman behind Mavis Beacon, a Haitian-born model named Renée L’Espérance. Back when app stores were still brick-and-mortar locations, retailers were convinced that a software program that featured not just any black woman, but a dark-skinned black woman, would turn off potential buyers. But Beacon sold more than 6 million copies over the next 11 years — an astonishing result in an era when black women were barely to be found. One third of American households I had a personal computer. It has since become one of the most successful educational products of all time.
Early in the film, Beacon is touted as a pioneer among “servile fembot assistants”—the “Aunt Jemima”-style “cyber doula” who midwifed Siri, Alexa, and so many others; superfans have gone so far as to fake images of Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey in honor of Beacon’s global impact, which includes, most notably, helping make computer science education accessible to people of color. The character’s cultural specificity extended further to the 3-inch-long acrylic nails that were superimposed on the screen; the sound they made as Beacon typed in unison with her users rang especially true for the documentary’s Black female creators. They treat L’Espérance’s decades-long retreat into seclusion like a barely investigated cold case of a missing Black woman. They hand out flyers, open a tip line, call former associates.
They set up an office that wouldn’t look out of place in a detective film, complete with a tangled conspiracy board—you could call it a noir if it weren’t for the film’s delightfully pastel-heavy color palette. When the clues don’t pan out, the filmmakers move on to draw broader comparisons to modern online identity politics, showing how especially problematic they are in queer culture. “At first, we had this whole Combahee River Collective idea of ‘the personal is political’ for the film,” Ross says. “But then as we lived our lives, we started breathing in broader theories. It just happened that we learned a lot from trans women, trans women of color about the dangers of hypervisibility and what it means to have photos of yourself go viral. I think it was important to use the documentary as a space to see how those ideas play out in the world because you can’t always make that connection.”
In one scene, Jones and Ross console each other after an emotional breakdown brought on by a six-year production gestation that began before Covid; the Robot Chicken-style TV in their office plays one of their biggest inspirations: The Watermelon Woman, a groundbreaking film about a young black lesbian investigating Fae Richards, a black actress famous for playing stereotypical “mommy” roles in 1930s films. “I’m a maximalist,” Jones says. “There were so many references to metaphor. I hope someone comes across this film and examines the history.”
Meanwhile, other scenes featuring pagan forms of black spirituality will remind viewers of another inscrutable black personality from the Mavis Beacon era: TV’s Miss Cleo. The paranormal allusions seem intended to open up another potential path to L’Espérance, as well as a means for the filmmakers to release the mounting frustration of dealing with so many conflicting witnesses. When one of Beacon’s white developers tells Jones, “It’s okay if you never find[L’Espérance],” it takes all of the director’s power to maintain her composure. “People only say this about black women,” she would later say.
Eventually, Jones and Ross nail down L’Espérance’s timeline: Spotted while working at the perfume counter of a department store, L’Espérance was paid $500 to impersonate Mavis Beacon (she supposedly didn’t even know what a computer was). That one-time payment bought the rights to the photos, but not any derivatives. When Software Toolworks, Beacon’s parent company, released the fifth edition of the app with a new image of its heroine instructor that looked like it had been poorly carved from a mahogany blockL’Espérance filed a lawsuit. The company eventually replaced her with several black models, but none made as strong an impression.
Though the outcome of L’Espérance’s lawsuit is unclear, the app’s developers—typical California garage startup morons—conspicuously omit that alarming detail from their carefully crafted folklore. “We had this whole vision of, ‘We’re going to do two interviews,’” Jones says, recalling Seeking’s initial approach to Beacon’s team of experts. “First we’d interview them and let them lie to our faces, and then we’d put them on the ropes, bring them back to headquarters, and say, ‘Here’s what we found. ’ But then, as we were building the film, I thought, ‘I’m sick of people other than Renée or anyone close to Renée talking about her. ’ So it was a conscious decision, to sacrifice the really satisfying moment of looking these men in the eye and saying, ‘I know you lied to me,’ to prioritize other things.”
After a nationwide raid and an exhaustive Internet search, the filmmakers only manage to get close to L’Espérance’s son, who politely tells Jones and Ross, despite years of surveillance, that his mother would prefer to remain anonymous. In a more traditional documentary, that ending would have been a failure. But here, it’s just one part of the journey. “Olivia and I learned so much more than we should about a stranger,” says Jones, who is still struggling to find a way to celebrate L’Espérance publicly while also respecting her privacy. “So that’s where you see the trade-off of, well, ‘If we can’t talk to Renee directly, let’s put ourselves in the film and talk to each other about this,’ and also planting this seed for our audience so they don’t feel the need to pick up where we left off.”
Well aware of the amateur sleuths who may be watching, Jones hinted at the possibility of sequel projects exploring the identities of the women who followed L’Espérance in the role of Beacon. “One of them is a life coach,” Ross says. “Another of them is an actress. One of them was a Republican politician whose platform was defunding public education. We want to share all of this with audiences, but before we could get into that continuing story, we had to pay homage to the OG.”
The modern artwork she and Ross created unfolds like a bubbly, heartfelt message in a bottle that typography could never do justice to. The hope is that one day the original master will see it and, perhaps, smile a little. “She knows the film exists,” Jones says, “and when we went into Sundance, she knew it, too. But for now, from Renee’s point of view, the feeling is still very strong: ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you. ’”
