When I began watching Jazmin Jones’ new documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon, I expected a film where Jones and their collaborator Olivia McKayla Ross would set out to connect with the woman who taught us all how to type. Quickly it’s revealed that wouldn’t be possible, because Mavis Beacon isn’t real.

But Renée L’Espérance, the model who three white men created the character based on, is real. And as Jazmin and Olivia try to find her, the film gets more and more complicated in its look at representation, privacy, and the stories told through technology.

It’s a fascinating film — both personal and expansive — and it was a pleasure talking to Jazmin and Olivia about the many ideas behind the project and how it evolved over the years of filming.

Jazmin: Thank you for making the time to talk with us. Our poster goes live at 1 and our website is down. Mercury in retrograde! So Olivia is going to be here for the first five minutes and then she unfortunately has to step out and get our website live. So if you have any Olivia-specific questions start there.

Drew: Sounds good! Olivia, how did the two of you meet?

Olivia: I met Jaz and their collective BUFU (By Us, For Us) in 2019 at this Arts and Technology conference in Minneapolis. I was volunteering there, and I was essentially trying to find all the weirdos. That was when their collective was presenting on their organizing work and documentary work in terms of Pan-Black/Pan-Asian solidarity organizing through creative practice. I was really inspired by that. and they were talking about this decentralized school that was happening that summer.

Everyone was feeling pretty disillusioned about academia so there was this really amazing project of the WYFY school (With You, For You) where folks taught all kinds of classes on dumpster diving and how to take selfies and Indigenous histories of New York and walking tours and foraging and yeah everything under the sun. I signed up to teach a class on cyber feminism and it was through that class that I got to practice a lot of the theories I had been thinking about and writing about and share them with a group. Particularly ideas around data trauma and the compounded effects of these facts about you being operationalized and turned into data points. How does that impact how you see the world and how you move around the world and how different systems act on you?

This concept of a cyber doula was prototyped in that class. My family runs a birthhouse and my eldest sister is a midwife, so it’s this idea of midwives and care work that was my first idea of what it meant to take care of another person. For so long in our nation’s history midwifery was kind of this in between career. sometimes it was okay, sometimes it was illegal And this idea of care by any means necessary and the idea that yeah we’re going to take care of our people. Even now when abortion access is under threat, seeing the midwives in my community be these renegade healers and clandestine careworkers. Careworkers are still my original role model for punk pirate care. I try to bring that energy to the digital space.

Drew: How have your ideas around that evolved since you taught the class?

Olivia: I feel like it’s become more present than ever. The thing I’ve noticed most since that class and since developing these ideas in public is that now there are more and more of us. There’s a chorus. I’m thinking of digital activists like YK Hong and Cyber Collective who we’re partnering with. They’re encouraging people to reframe their relationship to surveillance and surveillance capitalism and to reconsider the amount of shit we give companies for free. It’s a recontextualizing of that entire relationship.

I feel really pleased to see how people are more and more aware, especially as stuff like AI continues to encroach on people’s creativity and cause people to lose their jobs. It’s been starting to get more and more real. A lot of things you could write off as conspiracy theories in 2019 don’t feel that way at all anymore.

But now I’m also in this weird sensation where like you know how people are always calling Octavia Butler a fortune teller? A couple of weeks ago, it was the date when the events of Parable of the Sower begin. Everyone was reflecting on the book and saying Octavia Butler predicted everything and that she saw the future. It’s been weird to see that narrative play out and the Magical Negro-ification of Octavia Butler when no she was just noticing patterns. Capitalism is a pattern and y’all are mad predictable and it’s not actually that hard to extrapolate from the data that’s around us.  What are the compromises that we make every single day? The consequences of those behaviors seen on a multiyear scale cause us to end up in the situations we’re in now.

I’ve been feeling that way about this area we’re in and this idea of like oh this was so prophetic. No, the chickens are just coming home to roost, actually. But in terms of the multiple years passing and watching the film grow and the ideas percolating in people’s minds in different ways, it feels like this film has accidentally become quite timely.

Jazmin: Yeah, it’s interesting when I first started making this film six years ago — I was sadly on my own in grant writing in dark rooms for a while before Olivia came on — it felt like there was no place for a film that consists fully of Black people speaking critically about surveillance and technology. Then as we’ve been trying to wrap this project up and put it out into the world it’s like wait actually there’s a place for this and it needs to come out immediately. We watched the Gabby Petito case and the actors strike over AI — there were all of these things happening around us surveilling other people and us being surveilled. I’m so grateful that we finished the film and that it’s coming out now. (laughs)

Drew: Yeah by the time things get talked about in the mainstream, they’re never new.

Olivia: Right. Really quickly before I leave, Jazmin, what’s your password?

[Censored back and forth about whether or not Jazmin’s password is secure enough]

Jazmin: If you want to hack our website, you have a few clues on how to do that.

Drew: I’m not very tech savvy, so I don’t think I’d have the capability even with that information.

Jazmin: Wait that’s— I say that so much and I’m like that’s just a narrative imposed upon us, babes, we are tech savvy. We’re on zoom!

Drew: Yeah!

Jazmin: We’re talking through the internet.

Drew: You know what, that’s a really good point. And like I’m also a filmmaker so I’m tech savvy when it comes to filmmaking. So I guess I just don’t know how to hack.

Jazmin: There’s some statistic about how straight white men apply for jobs where they’re under qualified whereas marginalized folks have to be over qualified. So by that metric you and I are extremely tech savvy.

Drew: I still won’t hack your website, but thank you for the confidence boost that I could.

Jazmin: (laughs)

Drew: Earlier this summer I read Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and I was thinking about it watching the movie and then it’s referenced directly. Can you talk about the power of combining storytelling and imagined truth with more traditional archival work?

Jazmin: I was always like let’s play with the reality, but critical fabulation is a term I became familiar with through Olivia. I was like Saidiya Hartman is the truth we need to interview her and then I was like wait a second there’s a name for this sensation?

Wayward Lives was a book I was reading while we were putting this film together and I thought it was so necessary. Another book I encountered is Lote and you see the author Shola von Reinhold show up online in the film. It’s a great follow up text and a great summer read. Please read it. It’s all about the perspective of this young queer archivist who encounters this photo of a Black woman wearing angel wings in the 1930s and steals it from the archives to find out more about this woman. Each chapter of Lote has these archival interludes where the author is presenting materials to you and you never really know if they’re real or fake. There’s one story about a woman who is being mistaken for Josephine Baker and is traveling on trains and using that to circumvent things. So for me there’s value both from a place of make believe and I just need to be told other stories around Blackness, Black femininity, us, not only living but thriving. Sometimes in absence of these stories and in absence of no one recording these histories, it’s helpful to project the reality we need to see.

Actually critical fabulation was a much bigger part of this project initially. When I was pitching it as a hybrid, we were in a much different time for technology. I was making my own deepfakes and I thought it was really fun and clever, this trick of the hand to put words in Obama’s mouth and Oprah’s mouth. There were a lot of clips where we were putting words in people’s mouths to create this history of Mavis Beacon. Olivia and I were like we’re going to create a more nuanced background for Mavis Beacon because there are all these unsung women in tech whose stories were never told. It was kind of following Cheryl Dunye’s philosophy in The Watermelon Woman of making your own history.

But then I started realizing like whatever I applied to Mavis Beacon — like if it was up to me she’d be queer and a sex worker and all these things I think are interesting from my vantage point — but this character of Mavis is not existing in a vacuum. She is in direct relationship to Renée L’Espérance and, unless Renée can weigh in on what we’re doing with this character, it is not my place to project more onto her.

Also AI changed and suddenly a computer could make a very seductive deepfake that people can’t even tell is fake anymore. it went from being fun and clever to being actually terrifying to me. So that’s another reason I’m glad this film took six years to make because had it come out three years ago it would have a different politic and we might be guilty of some of the same things we’re pointing at the developers for in terms of playing with this person’s image.

Drew: I did love the moment where you’re like I’m just watching The Watermelon Woman over and over again.

Jazmin: It was such a helpful text! And while making the film I also became familiar with two other movies where I was like wait this is the queer cinema I was always referencing and didn’t know existed: Chocolate Babies and Drylongso. When I saw Drylongso specifically. I was like hold on you’ve got two Black people in Oakland driving around in a convertible pulling tarot cards and looking into questions no one wants to — like yes The Watermelon Woman but also Drylongso. And then in Chocolate Babies you have a group of friends who are having conversations around intersectionality in the way me and my peers are talking about it today. I was simultaneously elated, I felt seen, my heart grew ten times, and then also my heart broke because how come I hadn’t seen these films? Why was I only watching The Watermelon Woman on repeat when there are these other queer references waiting to be excavated?

Drew: Chocolate Babies is incredible. I’ve never seen Drylongso! I’m very excited to watch it now.

Jazmin: We’re hoping to put together a film series where you can see movies that inspired us, so maybe you’ll get an opportunity to see Drylongso if you’re in New York.

Drew: Amazing.

Can you talk about the way queerness plays into the film?

[Olivia comes back]

Jazmin: I have an agenda with this movie. In addition to looking for Mavis Beacon because I clearly care a lot about Mavis Beacon — maybe too much — it’s my first movie so I had so many dreams and ideas and theories and songs and colors and outfits and things that I had to fit in. It’s my first movie and it all had to be there. And queerness is very much that too. Like yeah reading the synopsis you might be like why does an investigative documentary about a Black woman in tech have a ballroom scene? Why is this gay? And I’m like I don’t know it just had to be. It’s just a fact of our existence. A lot of people ask about our decision to integrate spirituality or these queer community spaces into the film and it’s like that’s just what Olivia and my world looks like.

Olivia: We kept the camera rolling.

Jazmin: We kept the camera rolling. And yeah I’ve read a few Letterboxd reviews from some white guys saying it was weird choice to turn the camera on ourselves and I’m like why was that a weird choice? If you got to make a feature film, wouldn’t you want to show all your cute queer friends? That’s never a question that comes up in queer audience, in Black femme audiences, they understand referencing the Combahee River Collective, the personal is political, it’s a given. Also I think we’re trolling certain audiences that wanted to get a true crime documentary. It’s like psych we’re gay! (laughs)

Drew: And also that’s part of the history of documentary filmmaking! Documentary filmmakers being on camera and a part of their work is an approach that’s been done and been celebrated for decades.

Jazmin: Also while people can obviously see the commonalities and draw the connection between us and The Watermelon Woman, I’m also a bro in my nonbinariness. I’m a hype beast. This is directly in conversation with the John Wilsons and the Nathan Fielders too. We very frequently watch a white man spiral out and we enjoy it. So to me it’s like sure this is a queer film because you see people do death drops but also I’m doing the same thing John Wilson and Nathan Fielder would do. I’m opening a door and going through it to the furthest possible conclusion. I think it’s easy to label those things as femme or queer, but it’s just because we’re femme and queer. If those are dog whistles to our community to let them know this is for us that’s cool but also this is part of a long lineage of personal documentary.

I took a class with Caveh Zahedi who is a problematic fave and if you google him he’s—

Olivia: He’s messy.

Jazmin: Messy. My last semester in college, I had to make a personal documentary every week and the more vulnerable the film was the higher your grade. And then if you got an A you got to screen your movie at Union Docs. So yeah I was in a gauntlet of bare your soul in cinema and that is where the heart of it is. If it seems hard to talk about, you probably should talk about it. And then thank God for queers who actually do carework and actually think of the ethical ramifications, because otherwise I would be fully Nathan Fielder.

Olivia: Nowadays people are more used to media as something for you to escape inside. The question of relatability is very important to some people. Like if I can’t step perfectly into your shoes then this film is bad. But relatability shouldn’t be a barometer for how good media is or how relevant media is. The idea of walking a mile in someone’s shoes is they’re not going to fit you. That’s the point! The point in walking a mile in someone’s shoes is it’s going to be very difficult. You’re not supposed to be able to wear other people’s shoes.

Jazmin: (laughs)

Olivia: It’s not going to fit perfectly and feel like you’re wearing your own shoes. That’s not what that metaphor means. And I think we live in an age where your Netflix recommendations are super tailored to you and it’s easy to feel like if media doesn’t speak to your specific experience it’s wrong or that you should never have seen it.

Jazmin: Whereas people at the margins have always had to project ourselves onto other people’s stories.

Olivia: Yeah I’m really good at wearing a white girl’s shoes. (laughs)

Jazmin: (laughs) You’ve walked a few miles

Olivia: I’ve walked a couple miles in a little white girl’s shoes. I watched The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

Jazmin: (laughs)

Olivia: While it wasn’t an active decision to talk about queer communities and it was just a factor of us living our lives, I do think Black trans women are kind of like the vanguard of interrogating these ideas of hypervisibility, of privacy, of maroonage, of what it means to have your image everywhere without your consent and what it means to go ghost and what it means to have to think about these ideas constantly. The idea that hypervisibility even could be a trap is something that is very deeply understood by queer and trans communities. So there is a thread of lived experience that mirrors the theory and we invite people to talk about. But it’s also quite encrypted if you don’t already have that relationship to these communities because you aren’t able to have that kind of insight so it may look like oh they just went to a ball. They may not know why whereas for anyone who is part of that community the decision to go from recorded videos of dancers going viral and people watching clips in the Uber to Legacy Russell talking about glitches and redaction work makes perfect fucking sense.

Drew: I really appreciate how the movie holds these conflicting ideas around representation. You have these moments, Jazmin, where you talk about the positive impact of Mavis Beacon while also exploring the limits of that. I think ideas of representation have evolved a lot over the last five years and hopefully we’re moving away from this easy belief in representation. But I’m wondering where you both still see the value of it — or maybe don’t.

Jazmin: We regurgitate a lot of the same information in these interviews, but there’s an original thought I’m trying to put together here. In this movie you see us hit the limitations of what representation can do. Right? I am asking the character of Mavis Beacon to hold all of these things and hopes and dreams and there’s a point in the film where we can no longer project anything else onto this character. There’s nothing more. So I think the lesson of this process is all of these emblems and icons are useful but there’s a point where they stop being useful and you have to fill in the blanks for yourself. You have to be the person you needed when you were younger.

You’re watching us confront the limitations of representation in this movie. And I’m really grappling with that. I think Olivia comes to that conclusion much sooner. She’s a little wiser in accepting the limitations of what we can put onto Renée and Mavis Beacon. But for me that’s a really painful process. I’m like no no no you were the icon I needed and we were gonna talk and we were gonna interview you! You see me struggling with this idea I was raised on that representation matters and everyone needs to tell their own story. But not everyone wants to tell their story. That is not always the solution. So yeah there’s a point in which we’ve put everything we can onto Mavis Beacon and it just breaks and we have to answer the questions for ourselves and fill in. In many ways as we’re trying to protect Renee’s privacy and have a conversation around parasocial relationships, it has forced Olivia and I to offer ourselves up in exchange.

Drew: Woah.

Jazmin: Like okay our interview subject isn’t going to talk to us so I guess we’re going to have to reveal what’s happening with our internal monologue. So as we’re discovering this awareness of just how important privacy is—

Olivia: We’re giving it up.

Jazmin: We abandon our own privacy to tie this thing up. So it’s a weird meta process.

Olivia: Speaking of queer thinkers, Susan Sontag in On Photography talks about how we live in an economy that is really comfortable giving hungry people pictures of food instead of food.

Drew: Damn.

Olivia: And I feel like for a long time whether it’s people of color, Black people, queer people — and this consent was manufactured for us — but this idea of submitting to a system that would rather give us photographs and visuals and movies about queer people living vibrant safe healthy lives rather than giving actual queer people vibrant safe healthy lives. Giving up representation in exchange for self actualization was probably one of the biggest lessons of Mavis Beacon. Like what if we did all this shit for real? How about instead of dreaming up futures we just lived?

Neema Githere, who we cite in the film, talks about afropresentism as a kind of child of the dreams the people who came before us had of afrofuturism. We are currently living in 2024. This is futuristic. Sun Ra was thinking about 2024. Octavia Butler was thinking about 2024. We are in the present the futurists were thinking of. Now we have to stop living in the future. We actually have to do it now. And I think that was something Renée has also been teaching us.

Seeking Mavis Beacon is now in theatres.

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