Investigates the disappearance and reexamines the legacy of one of the most influential Black women in technology.
The World Wide Web beautifully unites the world in so many different ways that we often forget that its corners are not meant for us. Curated by an algorithm, everyone’s internet experience is sharp and precise, unlike the mind-expanding medium we were promised. Some of the best internet documentaries expand our views of this online world by showing us the microclimates that rolled into being after more than two decades of continentally colliding and forming an exciting new world. The conjunction of niche corners of the internet proves the most unique and exciting, albeit easier to watch from a documentarian’s review. Seeking Mavis Beacon centers two women in the throes of some of the wildest corners of the internet without that separation layer. While technically it focuses on an actual search for Renee L’esperance (the model used on Mavis Beacon box covers) it really documents the experience of growing up and living online both its fraught implications and its joyous discoveries from niche cultures to cyber-stalking. Seeking Mavis Beacon shows a sort of “terminally online” perspective of both the filmmaker and the subject in ways that deviate lethargically from time to time until the conclusion of the film draws the most daring existential question of them all: Why make this movie if the subject doesn’t want to be found?
Jazmine Jones opens this film with a dramatic scene of two winged women lugging out a corkboard littered with investigative pictures and lighting it on fire. Cut to: a hodge-podge of memes, TikToks, TEDTalks, and more before landing on a CSII art home screen of the software Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. This literal onscreen production serves up these interstitials as chapter breaks or mood establishers and solidifies, early on, the somewhat mixed tone of the piece. It aspires to reverence but defers to solipsism from time to time. It’s the sort of documentary move that unsettles traditional viewers as the documentary veers off its investigative track time and time again to introduce ideas before re-centering on the filmmakers in a “main character energy” the next generation is fond of identifying.
Look, this film feels unique and powerful in spare glimpses. Jones pulls clips from TED Talks asking why AI is all voiced by women. They interview a Scottish author (over a pink and white high tea ceremony) about efforts to remain anonymous. The very subject of Mavis Beacon introduced a tide of people of color to STEM fields, and yet she only made a lump sum of cash for her sea change. These all get minor lip service in the slow draw to find the original model, yes, but they’re shortly ended after a development in the case or a change in their personal lives. Rather than create a thesis of ideas, these presentations curate an attention-wandering narrative that establishes more the feeling of being terminally online rather than pontificating about specific subjects on the internet. This is hard to maintain, given that each idea suggested is a documentary in and of itself worth watching. Plus, the documentary spends the back half interrogating itself over the question: What if your subject doesn’t want to be part of your film?
The existential threat of the very thing you’re looking for not wanting to be found places this documentary in some sticky ways of thinking. Jazmine and her collaborator Olivia spend so much time amateur sleuthing to discover where Renee is and to have her share her story. Jazmine explains at one point, “Justice, to me, is having her tell her story.” But what if Renee’s justice is to live in peace quietly? How do these conflicting ideas reach an accord? The more straightforward answer is that they don’t. Still, the cognitive dissonance provoked by Renee L’esperance’s wanting to remain hidden and my watching a documentary that teaches me her name seems like a living document of conflict more than the capstone of a moral quandary. The fact that this film exists highlights the filmmakers’ need to validate their entire project or else risk losing years of their lives. If Renee doesn’t want to be found and Jones et al. want to honor Renee’s wishes, then why would we share this documentary in the first place? It’s a conundrum, for sure. Enter the spin of the camera to focus on the filmmaker itself.
If the movie can’t be about Renee, it must be about Jazmine and Olivia’s journey instead. To wit, they are the most interesting humans onscreen. Their relationship with each other feels wholly unguarded and delightful. They wander in and out of alternative spaces in the Bay area and Florida that might never be seen onscreen were it not for these two. Their maximalist office might make a great art space in and of itself. They go about interrogating people of color on the streets, great underground authors cloaked by veils, and even the boring white guys who created Mavis Beacon in the first place. They use the ‘no wrong ideas’ method to investigate and get tarot card readings and Haitian dance rituals while corking the answers they can find online. The focus on them as alternative black girls raised by the internet could not be more precise, and yet, the film walks away from any sharper depictions. The only moments of frustration meet with minor unravelings as their landlords trash their space, Olivia finds out she has to start college at a freshman-year level, and Jazmine bumps against a dead end in her search. For a movie uniquely interested in alternative spaces, vibrant personalities, and truthful depiction, the more curated version of these two women (who deserve to be their own manic pixie dream girls, let’s be fair) speaks more to the warring sides of a generation raised on cellphones than it does to a singular cohesiveness.
So yeah, the frustration stems through the final thirty minutes of the movie. The filmmaker finds herself at wits’ end. The team is no longer on the hunt. The answer they found, after all this searching, is simply: no. In the lack of space around that, the guiding mechanic of the film falls apart. We’re left with merely the feeling of being online, living in these two girls’ algorithms, and maybe glancing shortly at deep inner motivations but never truly seeing them. To be terminally online is never to be fully yourself, and the internet has biases that afflict our leads, but they’re not always going to explain them. It can be maddening to exist in their shoes, but perhaps the lesson of this film is not where Mavis Beacon actually is but rather the frustrating build of being born of this later generation, raised by phones, traumatized by a pandemic, and exposed to wild new worlds on the internet to feel the truth slipping between your fingers every second of every day. Could time have been better spent interrogating one idea over another? Possibly, but the total experience of the film seems to hit the ‘vibes’ nail on the head more than anything else and perhaps tells me that documentary filmmaking is some of the most challenging stuff out there.
In Theaters Friday, August 30th
