Seeking Mavis Beacon

Scott Hardie: “It sucked.”

This documentary starts out well, by explaining the history of the "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" computer game series, and how much it meant to Black girls to see a Black woman on the box at a time when Black women were not associated with technology and did not appear in instructional roles. Along the way, the movie gets a lot out of its clever digital design, presenting its snippets of video as if they are files being opened on an animated desktop, with amusing Easter eggs for anyone reading the text closely. And it draws subtle influence from a long line of Black female artists and thinkers, from Toni Morrison to bell hooks to Cheryl Dunye to Zora Neale Huston.

But about one-third of the way through, the movie makes the disastrous mistake of going all-in on finding the original model who was the first of many to portray Mavis Beacon on the box. The filmmakers become so obsessed with finding this one cover model, to the exclusion of discussing anything else about the game or trying to find any of the subsequent women to play the same character, that the search for her takes over the entire movie, and all other possible material worth discussing is abandoned. There's an under-developed subplot about how this Black model got screwed out of her deserved rewards by the white men running the company who made a fortune from her likeness, but without knowing the size of the legal settlement that ended their relationship, and without finding anyone willing to discuss the matter on-screen, this subplot goes nowhere. The film devolves into an unstructured mush of the two filmmakers rambling endlessly about how much this one model meant to them and how badly they want to thank her in person, which is sweet but hardly enough to sustain over an hour of running time. The film should have been abandoned or completely re-tooled when it became clear that pursuing this model was not working, but the filmmakers refuse to get off of the "interview this one specific woman at all costs" track that they've set for themselves. The resulting movie approaches unwatchable at points.

As I said recently, I really don't like panning the work of small-time filmmakers who have struggled to get deeply personal projects off of the ground with severely limited resources. The women who made this seem like good people and I'd watch future documentaries by them. But I'd be lying if I said that this movie was a success.This review contains spoilers. Reveal it.

− December 30, 2024 • more by Scott • log in or create an account to reply