A Film That Could Fix Our Relationship With the Internet
7 min read
When the filmmaker Jazmin Jones was growing up, she thought of Mavis Beacon—the face of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, a popular educational game first released in 1987—as a living and breathing celebrity. “Mavis” was an attractive Black woman with slicked-back hair, seen on the box art exuding warm, approachable authority in her corporate clothing and radiant smile. She held a child’s hand in a photo on the cover’s inside flap, guiding him down a sidewalk. With her positive attitude, she made typing on a QWERTY keyboard seem accessible, not intimidating. She was “like Santa Claus,” Jones told me in January at the Sundance Film Festival. “When I was hanging out with her as a child, she was real.”
Except “Mavis” was never real, just an avatar who amiably interacted with users, leading many of them to believe she was an actual typing wiz. The Software Toolworks, the developer behind the game, didn’t dispel this notion: Mavis had become the rare Black female role model in the computer-programming space and was reaching Black consumers in a way that other games had not. Teachers called the company asking for her. She received countless requests for in-person speaking engagements. Children looked up to her.
The truth is, Mavis was played by a Haitian model named Renée L’Esperance. The game’s white male creators said in interviews that they hadn’t intended at first to cast a Black woman in the role; they’d merely stumbled upon L’Esperance while she was working behind a perfume counter at a Saks Fifth Avenue store and thought she’d look great as their game’s main character. L’Esperance agreed to pose for a photo shoot and earned $500—but after Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing became a best seller in the 1990s, and she became a recognizable figure, L’Esperance abandoned the spotlight. A Seattle Times article reported in 1995 that L’Esperance had moved back to the Caribbean. The game’s creators told Vice in 2015 they’d all simply lost touch with her.
L’Esperance herself never publicly spoke about Mavis or left a digital footprint. In the documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon, now in theaters, Jones and her collaborator Olivia McKayla Ross, a computer programmer and artist, attempt to find out what happened to L’Esperance—and maybe even track her down for an on-camera interview. The self-proclaimed “DIY e-girl detectives” embark upon an investigation that mixes traditional and atypical methods: Jones and Ross conduct interviews with people who might have known L’Esperance, as well as with artists, critics, and even psychics who might help them more abstractly connect with her. The duo probe the internet for clues to her whereabouts, while scouring social media for insight into Mavis’s legacy. Using talking heads and staged scenes, the documentary blends fact with fiction. The filmmakers told me they wanted to explore how someone who essentially deserted the internet can still influence an extremely online generation. Jones said of the project: “It was pitched as, ‘We’re gonna find the real person, and we’re going to make a more embellished, more nuanced backstory for Mavis Beacon.’”
To Jones and Ross, L’Esperance’s story embodies many tensions inherent to establishing our online selves. How does our identity transform when our image is distributed and replicated? Can tools like AI be truly humane, and who benefits from them the most? If we, like L’Esperance, don’t build our own digital histories, do others get to fill in the blanks for us without our consent? The result of their findings is an unconventional documentary that unfolds like the internet itself, gleefully falling down rabbit holes and going on tangents as it studies our ever-changing, uncontrollable relationship with technology.
Jones and Ross were hopeful that, after all these years, L’Esperance would share their enthusiasm for examining her singular place in tech history. Yet as they made the film, their work began to raise existential questions about technology that threatened their optimism. The model’s apparent disappearance felt like a pointed rebuke to the internet’s reach. The possibility that their project would force L’Esperance into the digital space, where our footprints have become impossible to fully erase, contributed to the filmmakers’ own growing unease about their online sleuthing.
Jones and Ross came close to constructing a profile of L’Esperance. The two were remarkably successful in their investigative efforts: They tracked down the creators of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, spoke with the then-girlfriend of one of them (who had actually spotted L’Esperance first), and found evidence that L’Esperance had taken legal action against The Software Toolworks. Yet the filmmakers also waded into murkier territory, opening what Jones called a “Pandora’s box” of ethical issues. To promote their film, Jones and Ross kept having to use images from L’Esperance’s initial photo shoot for the game’s first edition. The language in their social-media posts about L’Esperance’s disappearance risked encouraging others to initiate their own, potentially more harmful investigations. In addition, they’d made deepfakes when they first began the project in 2018—they’d wanted to imagine how a “real” Mavis Beacon would have lived—and employed AI to help with their search, but, over time, these tools started to feel “horrifying” to dabble in. As queer Black artists, the filmmakers found that the more they tried capturing what L’Esperance’s image meant for a generation of Black women, the more they projected their own hopes onto a person they’d never met. And the longer L’Esperance herself remained hidden, the more their quest resembled an obsessive hunt, like a web-based conspiracy theory gone haywire.
As such, Seeking Mavis Beacon eventually stops being about uncovering what happened to L’Esperance. Instead, it turns toward the discovery Jones and Ross make, which is an empathetic one: As they capture their own stumbles and successes on camera, they find that there’s always a gap between who they are and how their audience might receive them, even though they’re spearheading the project. They’re able to connect with what L’Esperance might have felt, seeing herself flattened into a two-dimensional mascot whose name overshadowed L’Esperance’s own.
The question of how to use images responsibly isn’t new, but in our era of endless transmission and surveillance, even a project meant to honor someone can become more than a little exploitative. The conundrum derives from the lack of agency we have over our digital selves. As hard as it may be to delete all traces of our virtual footprints, Jones said, the internet is also “forgetting about us in real time.” Her own Myspace profile has been taken offline, she pointed out, along with her Photobucket account and several old YouTube videos. Ross called such removal “data trauma,” a term underlining the profound pain that can come from the loss of content we created and hadn’t fully understood could become irretrievable one day. “The things that are actually our cultural heritage are disappearing,” Ross said. “The facts about us that are useful for corporations stay.”
Still, in trying to build a portrait of L’Esperance (a person) out of “Mavis Beacon” (a product), Jones and Ross encountered an uncomfortable truth: that perhaps they were taking advantage of her loss of control online, just as they’d experienced in their own lives. The pair made assumptions about why L’Esperance moved away from the States. They presumed her relationship with the internet was the same as theirs. They believed she had to be a Mavis-like role model without ever having met her. Jones started clearly seeing these disconnects as their search for L’Esperance progressed. “If it were up to me, you know, Mavis Beacon would be a queer exotic dancer,” she said, laughing. “But it’s like, there’s a real person who has real feelings, and they might not like this story that we’ve created and applied.”
That’s the kind of approach Ross hopes more people bring to their online encounters. For years, she’s called herself a cyber doula—a “corny term,” she told me, but one she feels captures how people should think more emotionally and carefully about the internet’s expansiveness. Seeking Mavis Beacon is in some ways part of that effort, the project’s own transformation a proof of concept that someone can determine how to use the internet responsibly, to prioritize humanity before results. Just because Jones and Ross were able to locate L’Esperance didn’t mean they had to drag her in front of the camera or divulge every detail about her whereabouts; indeed, they chose not to. Perhaps the early-Facebook-era catchphrase “Move fast and break things” should be reversed, Jones joked: “Let’s just move slow and heal things, please.”
Although many different models have played Mavis Beacon since L’Esperance initially graced the game’s cover, the character hasn’t changed much in the past 37 years. That any of us saw her as a real person is owed to a very human flaw, Seeking Mavis Beacon posits—a glitch in our system. We’ve developed habits that the internet has encouraged: to anthropomorphize the artificial, iterate on images, click and scroll and type and customize until we lose track of our search history and ourselves. But we can reject those instincts, too, and return to basics—to understand what technologies are meant to be used for, and learn how to do so accordingly. That was the point of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, after all, Ross said. “I was just like, ‘Mavis Beacon is teaching typing’—this is true,” she explained of her first impression of the game. “‘Mavis Beacon teaches typing’ is a full sentence.” And Mavis Beacon—real or not—doesn’t have to offer anything else.
