Seeking Mavis Beacon: Finding Truth and Tenderness in Digital Avatars
Civics of Tech Announcements
Monthly Tech Talk on Tuesday, 10/01/24. Join our monthly tech talks to discuss current events, articles, books, podcast, or whatever we choose related to technology and education. There is no agenda or schedule. Our next Tech Talk will be on Tuesday, October 1st, 2024 at 8-9pm EST/7-8pm CST/6-7pm MST/5-6pm PST. Learn more on our Events page and register to participate.
Next Book Club will be announced soon!
By Sharla Berry
Seeking Mavis Beacon is a wild ride. The documentary-style film follows two young Black DIY detectives as they search for Renée L'Espérance, the model who portrayed Mavis Beacon in the 1980s computer game Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.
The first goal of the film is to serve as a love letter to Beacon and L'Espérance, who, as an avatar, served as the first Black teacher for many students growing up in the late 1980s and into the early 2000s. The film’s subjects, who are mostly Black, reflect on how the Mavis Beacon avatar connected them with typing and computers, and helped them establish a positive relationship to technology. Interviewees shared compelling narratives of how a beautiful, brown-skinned woman in a business suit teaching typing served as a possibility model for achievement, particularly for young children of color.
While the film could have focused on the cultural impact of Mavis Beacon as avatar, it goes further, seeking to reclaim the narrative of Renée L'Espérance as the person behind the image. The filmmakers repeatedly consider the question, who is Renée L'Espérance? How did her role as a viral image, an early meme of sorts, impact her personally and financially? In pursuing these questions, the film asks viewers to consider the erasure of Black women in tech, and the role of fembots in providing consumers with assistance and support, without consideration for their own needs (or the needs of the women they represent).
As it asks these questions, the film gets progressively more experimental. In the view of the narrator, director Jazmin Jones, Renée L'Espérance and her avatar Mavis Beacon begin to merge. Using a montage of pithy memes and video clips, the filmmakers insert Beacon into cultural moments where she may or may not have been. Doing so gets us to question her impact and the ways in which Black women’s images are enhanced by and erased by technology. The film’s distortions of reality also force us to reflect on the increasingly dominant role of technology and particularly AI in our lives, and its ability to shape cultural memory. Here, as the filmmakers interweave dense cyber theory with ephemeral pop culture references, the film shines. It becomes a powerful tool for technology questioning and critique and is something that educators can definitely use to engage students around questions of online authenticity and ownership of digital content.
But then the film gets weird. As the film progresses, its two lead detectives, Jones and her collaborator Olivia McKayla Ross, dive deeper into their search not just for Mavis’s narrative, but for Renée herself. The young women go on a multistate journey to search for Renée and anyone who might have known her. At times, this search raises important questions related to technology ethics, like when they track down the creators of the game and question them about their choice to put a Black woman on the cover, and their relationship to her. At other times, the filmmakers tread into tricky ethical territory, when they contact Renée’s family members and plead with an opportunity to speak with her. This journey, which is one of the central narratives of the film, asks us to consider the role of parasocial relationships, including those with avatars, in our lives. While the millennial director and her Gen-Z collaborator feel justified in their efforts to communicate with a real person because they feel deep connection with her avatar, the viewers must navigate feelings of discomfort and ask themselves where their own sense of digital ethics lies.
Seeking Mavis Beacon is a stunning commentary on how deeply avatars can impact individuals and shape culture. As a sociological endeavor, the film is also a brilliant reflection on youth culture, stan culture, and the ways in which nostalgia impact our sense of reality. As an educational project, the film makes a significant contribution in that it highlights the role of a Black educator who reached over 6 million homes and created a multi-generational impact. The historical, social, and educational aspects of the film make it engaging even to those who are unfamiliar with the game.
Finally, what makes Seeking Mavis Beacon an important film to watch is that it provides a tender, meditative visual centering on Black girlhood. The film functions as a Black girl’s coming of age story, particularly for Olivia, who turns 21 during the multi-year timespan of the film. As we watch Jazmin and Olivia laugh, cry, dance, ride skateboards and braid their hair, we develop a deeper awareness of the joy and vulnerability Black girls face when growing up in the digital era.
Seeking Mavis Beacon is in select theatres nationwide. For more information, visit https://www.seekingmavisbeacon.com/