Lara Croft: Cyber Heroine (review)

As I write this review of Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky's book, Lara Croft: Cyber Heroine, today's technology news from the BBC shows the headline "Lara Croft Firm Gets Bid Approach." Following the link to the story, I learn that interest in SCI Entertainment—the company that currently owns the Tomb Raider video game series featuring the Lara Croft character—rose after SCI announced that several companies expressed interest in buying it. What is interesting about this report is not the fact that some entertainment company's stock earnings have improved but rather that the BBC news highlights the Lara Croft name while omitting the name of the game from which she originates. This treatment of the Lara Croft character is consistent with the insights found in Deuber-Mankowsky's book, for as she shows us, Lara Croft was—and, obviously, still is—a "phenomenon, one that overstep[s] the boundaries between the sexes just as she has those between virtuality and reality" (pp. 4-5). For millions of fans around the world, Lara Croft, not Tomb Raider, is what drives their interest, just as for an entertainment company her image, not the game, showcases its news. It is this curiosity that Deuber-Mankowsky seeks to explain in the book.

The book, Volume 14 of University of Minnesota's Electronic Mediations series, is actually a translation of a work originally written in German and released in 2001 just after the Lara Croft sensation had reached its peak with the release of the first Tomb Raider movie. Entitled Lara Croft—Modell, Medium, Cyberheldin: Das virtuelle Geschlecht und seine metaphysischen Tuchen, the book has been updated and expanded to address changes and additions to the Lara Croft phenomenon. The foreword by Sue-Ellen Case situates the work in current feminist and new media perspectives, and the final chapter, "Afterplay," brings the work into the present. If after finishing it last night I wondered how much power the character still holds on global markets, the answer, of course, came in the morning news. Obviously, a lot. So, for those of us interested in feminism, cyberfeminism, popular culture, cultural studies, visual rhetoric and perhaps even new media and game studies, the information in this book still holds weight.

Deuber-Mankowsky is an engaging writer who builds her argument carefully. She begins in Chapter 1 with "The Phenomenon of Lara Croft" as much to taunt any naysayer to read the book as to inform her audiences about the elements underlying the character's success. From there she explains the character's origins, where we learn Lara Croft was preceded by a plump male character by the name of Rick Dangerous, whose oversized nose matched his belly, and who himself owed a large debt to Indiana Jones. (Oversized bodily features, by the way, seems to be the common denominator between Rick and Lara.) The shift from Rick to Lara, and Lara's success as a "multi-million dollar advertising commodity" speaks to the issues the author explores in the rest of the book—what she calls distinct yet overlapping, "mutually reinforcing" sources that are "economic in nature . . . medial, and . . . sexual" (p. 15). Deuber-Mankowsky follows these three threads, weaving together everyone and everything from Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, Sybille Kramer, Teresa de Lauretis, Slavoj Zizek, Ernst Kantorowicz, Enid Coleslaw (a character from Ghost World), Cartesian theory, The Matrix, Heidi and U2, to name a few theorists, characters, ideas and rock bands used to make her argument.

The final analysis of how and why Lara Croft achieved such success and what that success says about us as human beings as well as our attitudes toward women and media would have carried more of a bang in 2001, perhaps, than it does in 2005. For today, when a vapid media personality such as Paris Hilton can find fame for no reason other than her...