Tomb Raider (2015)

I missed the Tomb Raider phenomenon (well, avoided it) and so missed Lara Croft, from her first release in 1996 with pyramidical breasts, to her movie franchise with Angelina Jolie, to the most recent (critically acclaimed) action/adventure AAA game Tomb Raider. And hey, today is International Women's Day, so a good moment to reflect on the first major female protagonist in a successful video game series. Which is a statement I first have to qualify. I'm not discounting that other games before featured playable female characters, but Lara Croft is the first one who you know is female from the beginning (unlike Samus in Metroid, who's female only in retrospect), your only option for play (unlike the female characters you have the option of playing in games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, or Super Mario Kart), and not a derivative sidekick who gets her own game only after the male character has named the franchise (like Ms.Pac-Man).

Which is not necessarily saying that Lara Croft is a feminist heroine. As with many things feminist, it's all kinda sticky to untangle. She's so badass, what a great role model for girls! But—most people playing her are men, and she's oversexualized even when the art style makes her polygonal sexualization absurd, indicating that she *will* symbolize sex, damnit, even if it's not at all sexy. On the other hand, plenty of male game protagonists are idealized too, and certainly men in comics or on tv possess he-man proportions that the average man does not. Granted. But. Crowds of girls or gay boys didn't sit around playing Goldeneye 007 partly for the game and partly to stare at James Bond's ass. Metroid, which was released a decade before Lara Croft, was famous for revealing its main character to be female only on completion (she's wearing an androgynous spacesuit throughout, until she removes her helmet in the final scene). It's hard not to infer that women can be neutral protagonists, sure, but if you want players to focus on the seriousness of the gameplay, the character must be assumed to be male.

All of which reminds one a whole lot of Mulvey's "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema," the essay that intertwined psychoanalysis, feminism, and film theory, as well as brought the concept of the "male gaze" into public discourse 45 years ago. Mulvey contends that when we watch classic hollywood films (she highlights Hitchcock's Vertigo and Rear Window), we're identifying with their male protagonists. The women in the films are erotic objects we scopophilically possess, gazing at them in rapt attention from our comfy theater seats just as the protagonist gazes at them within the screen. As Mulvey famously writes,

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Women displayed as sexual object is the leit-motiff [sic] of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire…The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line [sic], to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.” (808–809)

Note that gazing at the beautiful onscreen woman is not without its narrative disadvantages. When the camera lovingly pans up Marlene Dietrich's legs, it's meant as a pleasure for her co-star and her audience, but it also distracts the narrative. Those legs are a pure, frozen moment of pleasure, not a spur to plot development. She’s an erotic bother, a "bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” Which could lead us on a whole new tangent about digressive, anti-plot strategies coded as quintessentially feminine, so much so that the eroticized pause in a film, as we distract ourselves from important male matters of state or murder to enjoy Grace Kelly's cleavage, does not jar so much as create an alternate, alternating feminized space of digressive anti-plotlessness within the camera's male gaze and the director's male narrative.

So. What to make of Lara Croft?

Mulvey's neat split between active/male and passive/female can't function here; Lara is nothing if not active. But by possessing such an eroticized body, Lara's activity (physical and intellectual—the character is a brilliant archaeology student) is inextricably linked with her sex (and the player's desire to have sex with her). Women on screen in Mulvey's reading are either scopophilic pleasure or stand-ins for the fear of castration, and, with all apologies to Mulvey and to Freud for this likely misreading, I keep returning to Lara's aestheticized pain and extremely audible injuries. Because she's in a video game, the world is constantly weaponized to wound her—snarling wolves chomp her neck, she's knocked out and wakes up tied upside down in a bloody chrysalis beside other corpses, plus the everyday leaps and scratches and bullets—and every one provokes an eroticized sigh, moan, grunt, or whimper. The most disturbing thing about this game for me was how much this girl gets hurt and how much she seems to like it, at least if we go by her noises. So Lara Croft is hot and masochistic, literally—her pain seems to turn her on, turning the pleased player into a sadist who repeatedly puts her through it. If he messes up the buttons, she agonizes (attractively) so he can play again.

Aestheticizing and eroticizing female pain is nothing new (Leslie Jamison's Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain is a great encapsulation of the idea). Jamison worries over "the possibility that being a woman requires being in pain, that pain is the unending glue and prerequisite of female consciousness." The suffering woman is too sexy, too mesmerizing to stop watching.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema." Visual and other pleasures. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1989. 14-26. (Reprint, it originally came out in Screen in 1973.)

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