SEEKING MAVIS BEACON - Mark Reviews Movies

Seeking Mavis Beacon, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 29, 2024

The amateur detectives at the center of Seeking Mavis Beacon clearly care about their case. It's the search for a woman who taught both of them about typing as children and, from there, raised a passion for technology in them.

There are some inherent challenges to their investigation. First, the woman isn't technically real, at least not in the sense of existing as an actual teacher. She's "Mavis Beacon," a mascot of sorts for a series of computer programs from the 1980s that helped kids—and some adults—learn how to type. What's unique about this fictional character is that she's a Black woman, put front and center on the box, throughout the marketing, and within the educational game itself at a time when that would have been an outlier.

The goal for director Jazmin Jones and her collaborator Olivia McKayla Ross, then, is finding out who the original model for the character was, with the intention of asking about her life, clearing up some urban legends and contradictory accounts that have arisen over the decades, and, most importantly, thanking her for being such an inspiration to the pair and countless other kids who grew up with the computer software. That brings up the second problem: How do you find someone who's only famous for a single thing, disappeared from seemingly any and all records, and might not want to be found in the first place?

On its face, this documentary seems fairly straightforward. Jones and Ross acquire a headquarters for their project, located in some office space for a non-profit organization that works toward preserving old forms of media, and start sleuthing. The investigation takes an uncertain amount of time—seemingly years, given the course of Ross' educational ambitions in the backdrop and the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic as the hunt progresses—and puts them in front of a lot of people who should know the story of the real "Mavis Beacon."

Things become complicated, though—and not just because some of those people seem a little hesitant to talk about this mysterious woman. Almost immediately, Jones' movie suggests a broader and shakier presentation. The documentary begins with a warning that it uses some modern technology, including of the "deep fake" variety, to make its points. This account isn't just about some objective search for a "missing" woman, after all, because the disclaimer makes it clear that Jones wants to give us some sense of her subjective experience of the mission.

This isn't to suggest that the movie is intrinsically fake, of course, because it's pretty apparent when the filmmaker is using such tools. Some people, after all, have distinct memories of "Mavis Beacon" being real and being celebrated throughout the years for her work in educating children, so the story opens with digitally altered footage of those imaginary award ceremonies and celebrations.

Later on, Jones and Ross provide an idea of how relatively easy it could be to fake real people saying things they never said, and the real warning here, then, is that technology is advancing so quickly and, in some cases, with little concern for the ethics of the consequences. It's little wonder that a woman whose likeness became a part of the cultural landscape, inspired so many rumors and conspiracy theories and false memories, and did all of this, to some degree, without her consent would simply "disappear."

In other words, the movie has a lot to say, not only about the case of "Mavis Beacon," but also about all-encompassing nature of technology in the modern world, the perils of not understanding just how persistent it is and will continue to be, and how one might behave in an ethical way when technology provides so many easy but questionable shortcuts to getting exactly what one wants. Its ambitions ultimately get the better of the movie.

It's simply too much, and despite the opening idea that the documentary will take on a specific perspective, we're instead treated to interviews with experts in and seemingly random people with strong opinions about technology, such as social media and artificial intelligence and other things, and various issues that come from it. Some of this ties in directly to "Mavis Beacon" or, more specifically, the woman who portrayed her, since she appears to have no digital footprint. She's a private woman, according to her son, whom Jones and Ross only speak to on the phone, and as nice apologetic as the two are toward the unnamed and unseen man, even they admit they might be taking their investigation too far by contacting him.

Such insights and revelations, though, don't really come through here, as the movie's scattershot approach goes from the investigation, which leads the pair to talk to the developers of the typing software, to those sometimes-disconnected interviews with talking heads. At a certain point in Seeking Mavis Beacon, it becomes obvious that the detectives have hit a pretty significant dead end in their search, which might explain why the movie itself takes so many detours without reaching any certain destination.

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