SEEKING MAVIS BEACON documents the adventures of Gen Z coder Olivia McKayla Ross and the film’s director, Jazmin Jones, her millennial collaborator, as the two self-proclaimed “e-detectives” attempt to find the “real” Mavis Beacon—the Black woman who modeled for the eponymous instructor in the educational software program Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. First released in 1987 and still on the market today, the game has taught millions of people how to type on the QWERTY keyboard. Jones and Ross’s film about their hunt for this prototypical Black femme avatar is less a straightforward documentary than a kind of fantastic voyage at the intersection of magical realism and technology, revealing Beacon to be a central node in a network of provocative questions about Blackness, femininity, and digital culture.
The first “Mavis Beacon” was a Black woman who was paid to pose as the fictional typing teacher for the software’s cover. (Out of respect for this woman, who declined to be interviewed for the film, I will not use her name, which may be found circulating elsewhere.) Although the cover model has changed a few times since the “original” version, the Anniversary Edition ofMavis Beacon Teaches Typingcontinues to make use of the figure of a Black woman to promote the sale of the game. The digitized likeness of Mavis Beacon v.0 is recalled with nostalgic pleasure by the film’s interviewees, some of whom are conjured through technology in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” which “troubles the line between history and imagination”: In the opening scenes, we watch flawlessly generated simulations of Oprah and Obama laud Mavis Beacon for her contributions to education, technology, and humanity.
I can only imagine just how meaningful it was for Ross and Jones to come across the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing series for the first time. Even today, the feelings of finding home and belonging online are all too rare for girl “blerds,” or Black nerds (of which I am one). Seeking Mavis Beacon reflects not only their own investment in technology, but also the aesthetics of their “very online” generation and the post-internet art world. For example, Ross and Jones share a girls club/bat cave studio where they do their detective work, including hosting sessions with orishas to conjure Mavis Beacon; we see a typewriter decorated with candles as Jones sages the room. Many of us have caught ourselves ablaze with this feeling of near-religious fervor while sliding down internet rabbit holes, sometimes developing the kind of obsession with a celebrity or fictional figure called a “parasocial relationship.” That Seeking Mavis Beacon makes what had previously been a private act extremely public is the most compelling aspect of the documentary. At times I felt as if the collaborators’ daydreaming about Beacon had morphed into a Pinterest board that again morphed into a storyboard that, in turn, was brilliantly pitched for funding and distribution.
Beacon is a central node in a network of provocative questions about Blackness, femininity, and digital culture.
While seeking the original model for Mavis Beacon IRL, Jones refers to the character as the “Aunt Jemima of Technology,” which highlights the film’s central preoccupation with the ethical questions around using a Black model to sell software, and explains their obsession with her. (In her on-screen interview, the artist Stephanie Dinkins, who is known for her work at the intersection of AI and race, observes, “There are these histories of Black women supporting, teaching, and then somebody going off and having success that is not Black”; thus, Black women are seen as nonthreatening—useful assistants, but not serious competition to those looking to gain skills for the new information economy.) In the midst of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings, the breakfast food brand that featured the Mammy avatar Aunt Jemima, which was originally developed by the Pearl Mills Co. in 1889, was renamed, and the figure was retired. What does it mean to now describe Mavis Beacon herself as an analogue of Aunt Jemima—a character who already posed questions about “authenticity” and consent?
Here I am led to question how the empowerment of Black women in filmmaking and other media may become entangled with misogynoir. What happens when the pleasure of these artists’ creative freedom treads and trades on a specific Black woman’s life? It’s a question that Jones and Ross themselves raise when they explicitly talk in the film about the contradictions of being “e-girl detectives” who are also thinking about “surveillance, policing, and consent.” I cannot help but wonder what the model for Mavis Beacon might feel after watching this film about her (assuming she got a screener); but I can only wonder, given that the model herself would rather preserve her privacy than be “given her flowers” on camera, as Jones describes it—highlighting the importance of both fugitivity and visibility for Black people in a digital age.
My own mother was a computer programmer from the 1980s through the early 2000s. The ads for the film reminded me that her corporate attire matched Mavis Beacon’s look; both used their wardrobe and style to establish their authority. Eventually, as tech oligopolies are wont to do, my mother’s company downsized, and she returned to her first passion of teaching mathematics. Everything has changed; so little has changed. With its post-internet aesthetics and digital sleuthing, Seeking Mavis Beacon attempts to use contemporary technology to interrogate the connections between technologies, empowerment, and exploitation, including the loss of a right to privacy. But ultimately, how can these strategies make a difference in how we use technology, when it seems to always be far better at quickly adapting and updating old forms of oppression?
Darla Migan is a philosopher and art dealer. She curates at Variable Terms and teaches the online course Philosophy For Artists.
