Lara Croft: First of Her Kind

            When videogames first came out, they were geared towards young men and not girls. By the 1990’s, women were beginning to show interests to videogames, but there was something they wanted that these games were all missing: a female heroine. In the late 80s and early 90s, both Nintendo and Sega wanted to have nothing to do with changing their formula, knowing that if they were to push their games on women, their current players (boys and young men) would fall out of their market. Sony, who addressed all youth groups, broke the formula and created a game that featured a woman as the lead protagonist. This game had a sort of Indiana Jones feel to it, but also having enough originality to stand on its own. It was called Tomb Raider, and the main character was none other than Lara Croft.

            Helen W.Kennedy has studied characters in media and computer games for a time now. She has even published some volumes of her game studies titled The International Journal of Computer Game Research. In one of her chapters, she focuses on Lara Croft, posing the question: Is Lara a feminist icon or just a “Cyberbimbo”? There is no doubt that Tomb Raider marked a significant departure from the typical role of women within popular computer games, but over the years, she has been labeled as “eye candy” for male fans of the series. It can be said, though, that her success was both because of her adventurous ways within the game and the use of her female body.

Typical female heroine?

            The obvious connection between Tomb Raider and film narrative conventions and the way in which the game deploys themes and tropes from other popular cultural forms means that a feminist critique at the level of the politics of representation is somewhat inevitable. One such possible feminist approach might be to welcome the appearance of active female heroines within traditionally male or masculine genres. Lara Croft is by no means the first gun-toting action heroine and the iconography of her representation conforms to conventions deployed from Annie Get Your Gun onwards, but also has forerunners in comic book heroines such as Tank Girl. If, for example, we were to compare her to the representations within the female buddy-movie Thelma and Louise we can find many key commonalities. Tomb Raider also reworks a male-dominated genre and features a female central character: Lara totes a gun as she navigates a hostile landscape fraught with danger. Consider also the ending of Thelma and Louise – they die within the story yet the white screen and the snapshots of them during the credits offer other possible, more positive, endings; with Lara this process becomes even more elaborated as she is resolutely immortal – with each death there is the possibility to replay the level over and over until it comes out right. The popular media and feminist response to Thelma & Louise was also similarly polarized around the issue of their representation – did the fact that they wielded guns guarantee or undermine the films status as feminist? The juxtaposition of physical prowess and sexuality continues to produce a great deal of ambivalence amongst feminist and non-feminist commentators.

Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft in 1997's Tomb Raider

            There is another feminist film studies approach that is much less inclined to celebrate the presence of masculinized female bodies. Psychoanalytically informed approaches which have developed from the insights offered by Laura Mulvey's landmark essay (1975) on the function of women within film narrative have a very different take on the tropes of this type of image. Two key insights, which appear relevant to Lara, are Mulvey's argument that the female body operates as an eroticized object of the male gaze and the fetishistic and scopophilic pleasures that this provides for the male viewer. The second argument was that "active" or "strong" female characters signify a potential threat to the masculine order. This is a more complex argument, dependent as it is on a pyschoanalytic reading of unconscious processes. Within this narrative the female body is a castrated body and as such it represents the threat of castration itself. This threat, it is argued, is disavowed or rendered safe by the phallicization of the female body. It could be argued that Lara's femininity, and thus her castratedness, are disavowed through the heavy layering of fetishistic signifiers such as her glasses, her guns, the holster/garter belts, her long swinging hair.

            In the end, it is impossible to securely locate Lara within existing feminist frameworks, nor is it entirely possible to just dismiss her significance entirely. Kennedy demonstrates the range of potential subversive readings, but there exists no real "extra-textual" evidence to back this up – hence the focus on the text itself, which is on its own inadequacy to explore the range of pleasures available from playing as Lara – we can only conjecture. The girl gaming community, which communicates via the internet, has its own highly critical discourse about the imagery and content within computer games. They not only complain about the degree of sexist portrayals of women but also bemoan the stupidity of many female games characters and lack of strong female leaders in role playing games.