Seeking Mavis Beacon (Jazmin Jones, 2024).
From its very first scenes, Seeking Mavis Beacon (2024) invites audiences to interrogate their perceptions of reality. A dreamy hybrid documentary steeped in jewel-toned Tumblr aesthetics, the feature debut from Bay Area–raised artist and filmmaker Jazmin Jones unfolds as an investigation into the curious case of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, an educational software program that rose to popularity just as the internet was beginning to pervade in everyday life. Launched in 1987 by a trio of Silicon Valley developers, Mavis Beacon would go on to coach millions into a more comfortable relationship with technology. Over the years, the game’s early cover-art model, a Haitian expat named Renee L’Esperance, became a familiar face in households across the US and a rare Black icon in the (still) overwhelmingly white world of tech.
Despite the ubiquity of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, little was known about its namesake—including the fact that she was an entirely fictional character, produced through an early (and unauthorized) experiment in generative AI. As Jones and her team quickly discover, this lack of clarity around where L’Esperance ends and Beacon begins was at least partly by design. Scouted while working at a California department store, L’Esperance reportedly agreed to model for the game on the condition that her image would only be used for its cover. Yet as Mavis Beacon surged in popularity, her likeness was used across different editions and even in the game itself via a Sims-like avatar. While the game went on to rake in millions of dollars in sales, L’Esperance was only paid $500 with no residuals, making her story somewhat of a cautionary tale when it comes to consent and Black representation in virtual spaces.
It’s here that Jones and fellow “e-girl investigator” Olivia McKayla Ross—a digital theorist whose cyberfeminist philosophies guide the film—begin their quest. Seeking Mavis Beacon is both an attempt to set the record straight and an odyssey into the murkiness of collective memory, as Jones and Ross explore the cultural significance of the character that guided a generation and attempt to track down L’Esperance herself. Stretching across countless corners of the internet and at least three US states, the resulting film is as much a meditation on privacy as it is a gratifying, meme-heavy tribute to coming of age online.
On the heels of Seeking Mavis Beacon’s premieres at Sundance and True/False, I sat down with Jones and Ross, who is also the film’s associate producer, to discuss “desktop realism,” ethics, and centering their intuition as Black femmes online.
Seeking Mavis Beacon (Jazmin Jones, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Walk me through what spurred your collaboration. Was there a meet-cute, or just some good old internet stalking?
OLIVIA McKAYLA ROSS: Forty-eight hours after my high school graduation in 2018, I got on a flight to Minneapolis to be a student volunteer at Eyeo Festival, where Jaz was presenting with their arts organizing collective, BUFU [By Us For Us]. I was really excited because BUFU was probably one of the only Black/POC, queer and femme organizations there. When I found out they were also based in New York, I pitched this class about cyberfeminism for WYFY School, BUFU’s decentralized experimental school. That's where the idea of data trauma and cyber doulas came from. I was trying to come up with a syllabus for how to teach cyberfeminism to my own community in a way that felt relevant to the kinds of experiences we have online. I was thinking about how to navigate these enmeshed systems and stay whole as a person; how to develop a practice-based cyberfeminism that was specifically about a lived politic, not just cool post-internet art.
JAZMIN JONES: I was also studying Olivia's work online. I ended up editing a brief video we made of her cyberfeminism class, and I was like, Who is this person? She was giving language to these concepts that I was exploring in development with Seeking Mavis Beacon; this idea of a cyber doula [which we highlight in the film] as an entity who stewards nonviolent relationships to technology. Olivia was also talking about this idea of data trauma—that the things that happen to you online have real-life effects on us—and was really giving voice to those experiences. So I sent her a DM.
Seeking Mavis Beacon (Jazmin Jones, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Olivia, I’m thinking about that scene in the film where you encourage others to treat their conspiracy theories as intuition. Could each of you discuss how that sentiment relates to your overall approach with Seeking Mavis Beacon?
JONES: I used to identify more proudly as a conspiracy theorist before the era of Alex Jones. Now, I don't know, but the thing that resonates with me is that as people of color, as queer people, we often pick up on what people are putting down before the general public.
Prior to this project, I had a brief stint in corporate America, working at a woman's magazine as the only Black employee. It was fascinating to see how the news is actually manufactured, and how the things that the Black internet was talking about would take a week to reach my white coworkers—not just benign things like memes, but also breaking news.
I've always felt affirmed by how Black folks are the first ones to know what's up—we don't wait to figure out why other people are running. And I think that's more what I mean when I think about conspiracy theories. It's intuition. Hearing Olivia put theoretical language to that experience and affirm it made me feel less crazy, especially since a lot of this film is about feeling gaslit by society.
ROSS: Right. I feel like one of the biggest lessons to learn is how to cultivate a skillful, healthy relationship with what the internet can give you. That gives you the ability to really understand what is paranoia and what is intuition. Intuition is about connecting the dots before cognition—noticing a pattern before understanding it. That’s different from the foreboding sense of doom that comes from paranoia. I think cultivating more awareness for how to tell the difference is a really important skill, especially when you're living in a society that's focused on overwhelming and inundating you.
NOTEBOOK: What you're saying also relates to the fact that as Black women in particular, we’ve always valued other ways of knowing that aren't just rooted in the rational. We've had experiences that make us understand that what would be logical isn’t always what happens. I’m curious how this all relates to your research process for the film. What did your search histories look like over the course of this project?
JONES: What a great question. So there's the research that went into the film’s subjects and then there's the research that went into how to make a film like this. Those were happening simultaneously. I became really interested in the heroine’s journey arc. While I was put off by aspects of it that are incredibly gendered, it was also a helpful structure that allowed us to think about the film as a circle. The beginning of a heroine’s journey is very much a space of imitation, where characters are borrowing certain tools and imitating what they’ve seen in dominant culture, and I think that's what happens in the film. We had our headquarters, maps, printed documents, but we’re still critical of policing. We were mimicking these systems in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way, while also making room for dress-up and ritual spell-casting.
At the same time, we were really cognizant of the true-crime industry, of armchair detectives and Reddit groups. Production took place alongside the Gabby Petito investigation, where you had all of these TikTokers yielding helpful information but also going through people's garbage cans. I didn’t want this to turn into that sort of thing without knowing how Renee L’Esperance felt about this.
ROSS: I also think there is an assumption that if you follow a certain investigative path, then whether you answer the initial question is the only measure of success. But throughout the journey of the film, we gathered a lot of new and never-before-seen interviews with the people who created Mavis Beacon, which ends up expanding the world of the game to double or triple its size, while still honoring and respecting the privacy of its original subject.
And I’d add that viewers who are expecting to reach a neat conclusion, the way Jazmin and I initially were, might walk away feeling left high and dry. But if you step back and take in the film as a whole, you’ll actually absorb a lot of information about what Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing really was and its effect globally, as well as our ideas about internet culture, artificial intelligence, feminism, and race in these digital spaces. The opportunity for learning, in the traditional documentary sense, is actually quite wide. But unless you're able to listen when Black women speak, you're not going to feel like you're learning.
Seeking Mavis Beacon (Jazmin Jones, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Through the film, you bring viewers into conversation with a host of Black femme theorists—including Mandy Harris Williams, Stephanie Dinkins, and Legacy Russell. Could you discuss the importance of prioritizing those voices, especially considering the ecosystem of who usually gets to theorize about the internet?
JONES: Olivia and I were on the same page about that. Our producer, Guetty Felin, also pushed us to use this film as a Trojan horse opportunity, to bring in as many Black femme and queer perspectives as possible, and I stand by that decision. This is a real insider conversation and we're really just allowing audiences to sit in on how we speak about these things. Each person that we selected is someone we're in community with and that we respect very much.
The first person we interviewed was Mandy Harris Williams, and what she says about listening to Black women speak and how Mavis as a character has been problematized [and sexualized] by the gazes placed on her is important. I'm also really fond of the interviews we did with Shola von Reinhold. Olivia and I are the biggest fans of her writing and the way it leans into the possibility of critical fabulation in the archives. I think with Legacy Russell and Stephanie Dinkins, what's really beautiful is that they’re both our peers and people that we look up to. There’s this reverence and warmth and whimsy, even when Olivia is asking these super intense theoretical questions.
ROSS: And these conversations are all in people's living rooms and kitchens. It relates to this specific type of Black family gossip—these networks of distributing information that are specific to the way Black women and girls and femmes talk to each other—that pulse through the film in different ways. It allows us to be a little silly and to sit with the dissonance of certain scenes, like when we interview the white former employees and creators of the software company behind Mavis Beacon.
NOTEBOOK: Let’s talk about the look and feel of the film. Jazmin, you give us these dreamy neon hues alongside a slew of deepfakes and rapid-fire memes. Talk to me about the importance of pop-up windows as a motif in the film.
JONES: I have a background in video art, which is another place where Olivia and I overlap. I'm very comfortable expressing my thoughts and selves through screens and different windows. In the development phase, I became familiar with the phrase “desktop documentary” as a means of articulating these documentary films that are unfolding strictly through screens. It was a moment of oh, that's what I've been doing this whole time. Early on, I wasn't sure how to factor that into an investigative documentary, so we had to create some rules. We didn’t want to cut to some B-roll or pop-up windows everytime someone said something. We wanted those desktop montages to feel more refined, like portal jumping. I describe it as desktop realism, which is to say, it should look pretty similar to what it would look like if a hacker took over your computer and started going through all of your bookmarks, or if a spirit was surveilling.
At the onset of this project, Olivia and I had a really useful conversation about how people tend to depict the internet online, and she talked about this very masculine, Matrix-looking aesthetic—all code and green on black. And that's not how the Internet looks to us. The way Black femmes appear online is incredibly vibrant.
Seeking Mavis Beacon (Jazmin Jones, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: So much of this film is also about the slippery nature of memory, specifically in an era where traces of our actions and our identity linger everywhere online. What are your thoughts on what Legacy Russell says at one point, about the right to decide if we want to be forgotten?
ROSS: I feel like there’s a painful disconnect now, where on the one hand, the internet is forgetting you, and then on the other hand, the internet only remembers the most inhuman, random things that can be used to exploit you. The things that are precious—the memories that you make with other people, the relationships that you have in your chat logs, and the meat of people's connection to each other—are not seen as important data to maintain and preserve.
The question of what it means to have the right to be forgotten prompts a conversation, because what about you is being forgotten? For example, when it comes to Renee L’Esperance, it was oftentimes the most salacious detail—the idea that she had four- or five-inch-long fingernails—that was never forgotten. We don't even know if that was true, but it was reiterated and repeated as fact in all of these news articles.
Part of what Jaz and I learned through this process is that history is really just a long game of telephone. Oftentimes, the version of history that gets cosigned is either who said it the loudest, or who had the most socially sanctioned clout. When it comes to the internet, you can always make a trustworthy-looking website, as long as you have a good sense of graphic design, a budget, and the time to make it look saucy.
NOTEBOOK: This idea of sauciness, or web aesthetics, also points to how often we don't discuss the ways that class is enacted on the internet. So much of our understanding of “good design” is heavily tied to our proximity to wealth and institutions. I think this brings us back to what Jazmin was saying about the kinds of revelations that occur once you've seen the architecture of knowledge production laid bare, like, Wow, this could really go into the historical record if this one person doesn't fact-check this properly.
As we have this broader conversation about internet culture and what the internet does to culture that is not online, I want to discuss the way that Seeking Mavis Beacon, by nature of what it is, has a parasocial element to it. It also seems to be wrestling with whether public figures have an obligation to their fans. Where do your thoughts on this stand now and how have they evolved over the process of making this film?
JONES: This is something we’ve been talking about with audiences. Olivia and I grew a lot as researchers over the course of production. In the beginning of this process, we very much held onto this idea that everyone should tell their story, and if they haven't told their story, it's because they were silenced. We thought the only reason that Renee L’Esperance’s testimony hadn't been recorded is because the right people hadn't been asking. We were coming from a place of naïveté, frankly.
Meanwhile, two years into the process, after having cameras record us in our own homes in different states of emotional duress as these investigators, I think I came to understand just what a big ask it is for a filmmaker to film anyone. I can't imagine what it feels like if you also are not in the editing suite.
ROSS: Looking back, one of the things that helped ground us a lot was our producer, Guetty Felin, and working with an intergenerational team. Being able to use her as a sounding board as an older Black Caribbean woman was crucial. She helped us understand what priorities and anxieties someone who didn't grow up with constant access to the internet might have. That’s a headspace that neither Jazmin nor I were familiar with. Working with Guetty was also my first time meeting an older Black Caribbean woman who embodied creative success, who had built a multi-decade-long career for herself achieving beautiful films, even with fewer resources.
Seeking Mavis Beacon (Jazmin Jones, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: I want to go back to what you were saying about intuition. Renee was kind of a canary in the coal mine when it comes to these conversations about privacy, and specifically about the power of AI. What are you hoping viewers will learn from this story, especially as we keep seeing headline after headline about the risks of generative AI?
ROSS: I hope people understand that AI and oppressive technological systems in general need our consent to make things happen. This idea that we’re trapped in this imperial data environment has been reinforced through decades of Hollywood blockbusters, but at the end of the day, if you say no to participating in the system, and if you back up your no with action, you’ll find we still have the power, despite the amount of labor that's put into manufacturing our consent or tricking us into giving it.
JONES: As a millennial who's quite paranoid about the future of technology, I wanted the film to highlight the importance of being critical as we engage in these systems. Like Stephanie Dinkins says, we also can't just totally leave these things up to white men. Black women need to be involved in the building and beta testing of software.