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Lara Croft As The Final Girl
Clive Thompson, over at Wired, takes a look at the appeal of playing as Lara Croft ... and doesn't focus on her physical assets. From the article: "The Final Girl theory emerged in 1985, when Carol Clover -- a medievalist and feminist film critic -- was dared by a friend to see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Back then, most feminist theorists loathed slasher films, and regarded them as classic examples of male misogyny. It wasn't hard to figure out why: Thousands of young men were trooping into theaters to cheer wildly as masked psychos hacked apart screaming young women. That really didn't look good. But as Clover sat in the theaters, she noticed something curious. Sure, the young men would laugh and cheer as the villain hunted down his female prey. But eventually the movie would whittle down the victims to one last terrified woman -- the Final Girl, as Clover called her. Suddenly, the young men in the audience would switch their allegiance -- and begin cheering just as madly for the Final Girl as she attacked and killed the psycho."
Brinke Stevens -- my nomination for favorite Final Girl.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Please tell me I'm not the only one who stopped reading the summary at that point.
Heill, I'd settle with her as my first girl.. :P
I cheered at the end of Texas Chainsaw massacre because that meant the movie was almost over and I could get on to something more interesting. Maybe I'm too much of a geek. *shrug*
The summary at least misses the point. The audience didn't "switch their allegiances"; in each conflict, they were cheering for the better (generally smarter) of the combatants. That's why those films seldom just have people being killed. Instead:
Then, at the end, we get to see someone who didn't exhibit these character flaws win.
It has little or nothing to do with sexism, and everything to do with cheering for people with survival traits.
--MarkusQ
So does this mean the young men in question would be True Neutral?
:(){
You know, I have an MA in Literary and Rhetorical theory, and this kind of crap is why I left Literary study for Rhetoric and Digital Media when I went for the old Ph.D. The worst part is, I can probably cite most of the papers and books that this woman read, without even finding her references. It gets predictable. Want an alternate reading/viewing? Lara Croft is a modern female version of the "American Adam" archetype, as laid out by R.W.B. Lewis in 1955 in a book by the same name. She's "an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever [awaits her] with the aid of [her] own unique and inherent resources" (p.5).
The point - and I do have one - is simple: the beauty of cultural criticism is that everyone can debate it endlessly, and everyone who's got the right sources can be right! Yay!
"Tu fui, ego eris" - Virgil
I don't really know about Lara Croft, but I'd say I felt this for Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill. I was like, whoa.. I really want this chick to kick ass!
What I don't get is the mention of cheering when the bad guy killed the dumb girl. Didn't they cheer just as loudly when the bad guy killed the idiot boy? For me it was about getting rid of the stupid idiots no matter what their gender and then putting the agent of destruction away once the job was done.
Lara is indeed a girl that every boy wants to be with, but not in a plutonic way; they want to control her, and have her be the object of their sexual fantasies.
Someone needs to get laid.
I kid. I kid.
Calling Lara's breasts misproportionate makes as much sense as saying that the current mature female female is stunted somehow, and that Lara's is the right size. (My favorite explataion for why this would be so invovles the Earth being flawed, fallen, in sin, immature or whatever you want to call our pre-interstellar, information impoverished situation). By the way, with that logic, I'm sure Washu is misproportioned as well.
"Thousands of young men were trooping into theaters to cheer wildly as masked psychos hacked apart screaming young women... Suddenly, the young men in the audience would switch their allegiance -- and begin cheering just as madly for the Final Girl as she attacked and killed the psycho."
Maybe the men weren't cheering for the psycho or the woman, but for the violence itself .
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Buffy the Vampire Slayer was originally devised by Joss Whedon (who has a degree in feminist film studies) as the reversal of the girl and the monster enter the alley and only the monster exits. In contrast, with buffy she and the monster enter the alley and only Buffy exits. The first girl is the final girl, without the misogyny.
This is a much closer analogue to Laura Croft, or other fictional kickass ladies like the Major in Ghost in the Shell.
Hmmm the last girl who finally defeats the monster. Isn't this called "survival of the fittest"?
However, I really don't think of Lara as the "Final Girl". She's just a tough girl, period, if not a sex symbol. C'mon, we all know she was famous for her gravity-defying measures, but later was slimmed down to appeal more to the feminine public. I much less identify with her.
Now allow me to compare to another famous treasure hunter.
Indiana Jones
Family: A devout religious man (Junior?)
Studies: Ph. D. in Archeology
Job: Archeology teacher in Barnett College, NY ("X never ever marks the spot")
Reasons for treasure collecting: "It belongs in a museum!"
Favorite Gadgets: His leather whip and a Fedora with a very high sentimental value (belonged to the man who stole the Cross of Coronado).
Sex appeal: "And my mother's ears, but the rest belongs to you."
Most used quotes: "I hate Snakes!", and "Don't call me Junior!"
Lara Croft
Family: Extremely Rich family (can you compete with the Countess of Abbingdon?)
Studies: At home
Job: What job?
Reasons for treasure collecting: Add to her dad's collection, and, once in a while, save the world
Favorite Gadgets: Dual 9 mm Pistols
Sex appeal: Boing, boing, boing!
Most used quotes: ?
I'll take Indiana Jones, thank you.
I thought it was the Dangerous Chick With Weapons theory (i.e., Resident Evil, Blade Trinity, Aeon Flux, and Ultra Violet). Surprisingly, that was the one thing that didn't happen in the Silent Hill movie. The main chick lost her weapon (a butcher knife) before she could use it on anything, and the cop chick ran out of bullets before she was rendered unconscious. The ending was a bit peculiar since you do have a Final Girl but evil still won out in the end.
In the kitchen!
Guys keep scratching yourselves while wearing the stained wife beaters with holes.
Enough of the ism's, men and women are both sexual creatures and what sells is sex. Men, we know that we are craven sexaholics, no need for miss ovbious to point it out. Women you know you are domineering sex peddlers, you've been taught from a very young age to use your weapons. Can't we all just agree to disagree and let bygones be bygones?
Stereotypes hurt everyone but truthfully, appealing images sell for both men and women.
Wait, wait, wait. There's a whole theory based on an audience cheering for the person they expect to see win?
I'm shocked. No, no, not shocked that the audience sided with the obvious soon-to-be victor. That's predictable. I'm shocked that anyone places stock in a theory that suggests that the winner's traits matter in whether the audience sided with that character.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Hey guys....
UKism here but football is exactly the same. For anyone from the U.S. you might as well stop reading right now as i doubt this will make any sense.
"Does anyone know any manchester United supporters from Manchester?"
The fact is people will support whom ever ends up being glorious. In most of these films the girls are against impossible odds, so the men support the "evil henchman/manic killer/giant monster of death" and why?
Well lets get really "medievil"..... Cave men... they are fighting right? Big clans.... Your not going to support the losers are you? Death to the losers.
Anyone whom supports something that loses ends up dying along with it, its built into our genes. The reason the women dont do the same? Well they were not the hunters appently.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
I've only seen the first one.
Bull-Fucking-Shit (don't ask me how shit can fuck a bull, but this article made that seem to be a possibility).
That is all.
... is now a "final girl"? I applaud equal rights, but this overanalysis is achieving the opposite.
Why?
I have problems with the article as well. But consider that some video games do have less sexy female leads - Beyond Good and Evil, for one. That was a great game and it was just as fun plying her as it was Lara Croft.
I don't think in either case I am playing because I want to "be" with either one. Instead I enjoy "being" them - powerful, smart beings kicking ass when needed. I mean do all the people playing Doom also want to "be" with the marine?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I guess that, by the second of these alternative definitions, there may well be NASA astronauts who would want Lara Croft plutonically.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I don't pretend to understand all this literary big-word stuff... what I do know is that a female character doesn't have to be hot to kick some ass. Case in point: Metroid. Samus Aran was the classic video-game heroin (who always reminded me a lot of Ripley in Alien). We all cheered for Samus, even though, at first, we didn't know she was a chick because of the suit. But after we found out, we cheered even more. Because deep down, what guy doesn't like to get the crap kicked out of him by a girl?
The valkyrie at my side is shouting and laughing with the pure hate for blood-thirsty joy of the slaughter
And so am I
The fire, baby. It'll burn us both
There's no place in this world for our kind of fire
My warrior woman. My valkyrie
You'll always be mine. Always. And never
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Clearly, Lara Croft is actualizing her empowerment.
[All information here shared by my wife with her English masters degree. Any and all misinformation introduced by my transcription of her description of the theory.]
Actually Lara Croft doesn't really fit with the final girl theory. In Carol's definition you can't start with the *final* girl. She goes through a metamorphosis and becomes more masculine as she survives more of the horror.
Interesting points about the final girl theory:
The theory is flawed (all failings acknowledged by Carol Clover, she doesn't assert that this theory is anything grand or definite) in that it assumes that only adolescent males enjoy horror movies. The theory is completely broken if you agree that any women enjoy horror movies.
The theory itself says that the adolescent boys can identify with the final girl without themselves feeling threatened by the killer (who is hunting women), but who demonstrates the traits of a stereotypical adolescent male masculine fantasy (surviving against all odds, strong, capable, etc.). The theory is that this is a way for young men to indirectly experience homo-erotic fantasies. The women are characteristically running from phallic, penetrating objects such as knives and other stabbing weapons. Yet the final girl is also an erotic object herself. She usually has an asexual name (like Sam) and carries a phallic object like a torch, stick, etc.
Yes, the world of literary theory is stranger than you know. o_O
For pointing out a key point -- people consider violence masculine, so men are encouraged to enjoy violence. This is the real problem.
If you wanted more women there, either encourage women to violence, or discourage men from violence with films that aren't about stereotypical gender traits.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Suddenly, the young men in the audience would switch their allegiance -- and begin cheering just as madly for the Final Girl as she attacked and killed the psycho.
Dude, spoiler alert!
Thanks a million. Push Start to replay.
I think this is a case of over analysing things a bit to much, the real reason for Laras success is much simpler, the Tomb Raider games simply were good (well, at least the early ones) and one of the first real 3D games of the time. Tomb Raider basically put Prince of Persia into 3D and into a different setting, thats all, the breast thing was for most part an accident that then got used for marketing. If the games would have been not that good, there would have been much less hype and Lara would most likly be long forgotten. After all the Tomb Raider games doesn't even feature excessive use of violence, you defend yourself against a few aggressive animals and thats it, no human killing in TombRaider1 at all. If Tomb Raider really would have been about attracting teenage boys with sexy girls they would have added some more useless violence as well, wouldn't they?
I dunno. In a great many movies, I find myself cheering on the baddies as they get mowed down by the annoying heros. People don't like to support winners that are obviously going to win - they want the losers to stand a chance.
Examples: Die Hard, Broken Arrow, any Steven Seagal film...
Well actually, yes. Quite a lot, in fact. They seem mostly to live on the north side of the city, but they're there. It's just that they're enormously enormously enormously outnumbered by all the Man Utd fans elsewhere ...
Lara Croft isn't the Final Girl because she's not simply beset upon by danger like the victims in slasher movies. She is from a family of archeologists and she willingly places herself in dangerous situations in the name of exploration (and perhaps wealth and fame?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lara_Croft
It speaks well of Jolie as an actress that she was able to bring off the role without it being a joke.
Funny enough I find myself the exception to what you've wrote, I tend to support the characters I like most and find intresting.
Best example I can give is Yzak Jule from Gundam SEED. For the entire first series (except 2 out of 50 episodes), he did nothing but get the legs cut off his robot and scream loudly at people. In the end everyone loved him because he was just so intresting to watch rather than the hero who had now got aimbot and god mode in his mecha.
While at the same time I support a character who had God mode and aimbot just the same as the hero. Because he was intresting to watch and did intresting stuff.
But you have to take into account the type of people who watch slasher flicks. They're the FPS players of the movie world and like cheap quick thrills of horror with very black and white characters. Would you say that people who play RTS games also just want to kill stuff or enjoy the tactics and fun?
Never some people in 1 group up with a broadstatement. They all have their own motivies and most of them boil down to "I do what I enjoy". They don't care what it is they enjoy, they just enjoy it because they do.
I like muppets.
like other people have said, i don't believe it's about sexism at all, men just enjoy violence and cheer when there's some cool nasty gore going on, irrelevant of who it's happening to...
All the Alien stories I've seen, be it movies, comics or books, have a Final Girl. Ellen Ripley is of course the most well-known, but there are others, for example in the AvP movie.
The original Tomb Raider game was different in more ways than the gender of the main character. For starters, it was a BIG change from first person shooters, and looking back, it still stands out for it's differences.
In 1996, first person shooters were already a huge hit with gamers. In general, they tended to be somewhat brainless "if it moves, shoot it" type games(and still are for the most part). There were still some adventure games out there where you had to think your way through the adventure, but the popularity of first person shooters had already started to dominate the thinking of some people. And that's where Tomb Raider came in, as an alternative to that.
Tomb Raider featured extensive puzzle solving as a part of the gameplay. Jump from here to here to flip a lever to open a door, with a time limit on some parts of the puzzle. In many ways, the game would have done well with a male main character but using the same game.
Another feature that helped it do well was the support for 3D accelerators, which were JUST showing up on the market. Before that time, you had software rendering of everything, and to keep the game performance at the proper level, Eidos just couldn't provide high quality graphics(for the time) in software. Hardware acceleration(the original 3Dfx Voodoo chip being the dominant one) made the game look and play a LOT better. So for eye candy, this also had a large effect on how well the game did.
Then you had the subject matter, with Indiana Jones and treasure hunting being popular, a game that had the plot about going into ruins to look for treasure was a good one and it worked well.
You also had HUGE levels for the time. To come out of a pool of water to look UP at some large ruins that for whatever reason were now underground, and feel like the character is small in comparison was different from just about all the other game of the time was a very cool experience. Most of the ruins had animals in them to deal with, not people, so there was the sense that violence wasn't the core of the game.
And then, FINALLY, you had your female main character, with her trying to get all the pieces to the artifact. Obviously teenage boys tend to be drawn to women with large breasts, and many try to make this the center of any theories on why the original Tomb Raider game did well without looking at the other aspects of the game. There were a number of women as well as older players who enjoyed playing for the game design as the primary reason for enjoying the game. It's true that some women enjoyed playing a game where the main character was a woman, and the vast majority of men will enjoy seeing attractive women in a game, but I feel that the other aspects don't get enough attention when Tomb Raider gets mentioned.
Tomb Raider may not have done quite as well without a woman as the main character, but it was still an amazing game, and would have done well.
Look at all of the movies where the couples that have sex are always among the first to die. Basic social engineering.
Also the most physically fit character will also die early on, to establish that the "Bad Guy" is stronger/faster/harder than all of the rest. This is also usually combined with a certain amount of hierarchy-dominance games where that character will be initially established as the "Alpha-male", to give a greater emphasis when they die.
It was predicted by Jack Yeovil that when smoking was banned, that it would be the smokers that are the first to die. Wait and see...
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Sig. Measure Twice.
HAAAAHAHAHAAAAhahahaaaahaa! That's hilarious!
Feminist? Theory? HAHAHAHAAAA!
Darwin would appreciate this.
Truth, Just Us, And Hatred For All Mankind!
I'm not sure I've ever 'identified' with characters in any medium; and if I have it was more likely during the decision-making dialogue of Planescape Torment than in a spatial puzzle-solving/reaction test game. To my mind Lara is a vehicle, and it's nice to drive a flash car. And the games are perfectly playable from this perspective.
Greed, in its most base sense today implies hoarding money and doing whatever you can to get more of it. This can potentially have a very large impact on how attractive that person is to members of the opposite sex (particularly a rich guy with women) and thus has a direct affect on his chances of successfully reproducing.
The problem with this assumption is that the facts don't support it. The rich, on average, have fewer children, not more, as you assume. The reasons are complicated, but it basically boils down to a ratio of disposable income to cost of raising a child to occupy your niche in the economy. The rich have more money, but raising a rich kid is far more expensive than raising a poor child. Consequently, the rich can't afford to raise as many children as the poor can, and thus have fewer on average.
A compounding factor is time: no matter how rich you are, you only have so much time. Once you have enough money to raise as many children as you have time for, spending additional time acquiring more money is taking away from the time you have to produce and raise offspring and reducing your total number of children.
--MarkusQ
However in terms of personal survival (rather than survival of the species)
Genes don't optimize the survival of the species. They don't even care about the survival of the individual. The one and only thing that they seek to optimize is the number of copies of themselves that make it into subsequent generations. Genes. Not individuals, not the species. So (from the gene's point of view) none of the other what-ifs matter if you aren't making babies or helping your close kin make babies. A gene for a trait that hindered the spread of that gene would be doomed, no matter how well it looked after the individuals that had it before it vanished from the genome.
--MarkusQ
My wife was an English lit major in college. We had lot of arguments about the validity of feminist interpretations of various books and movies. When she came out of class one day convinced that there was a global male conspiracy to disenfranchise women I just about lost it. I mean honestly, its tough enough to get more than 4 guys to agree on anything more complex than which football game to watch, and that is not a trivial task in and of itself on some Sundays.
Anyway, years later I stumbled onto this link http://www.dourish.com/goodies/decon.html online. It pretty much summarizes how to deconstruct any book or movie and then turn it around to make it fit whatever interpretation you are looking for.
I don't see any more validity to folks who look for blantantly feminist themes in games, movies, book, etc...than I do with folks who always look at things with an intent to overlay racial overtones. In the end they will find what they are looking for, or at least make it appear as if they do.
Yeah right, we identify with the character. That's why we like Lara Croft so much. So if she didn't look as hot as she does, or if she were a boy or something, the game and movie would be just as popular right?
From my perspective, espousing the average body as ideal is the sexist viewpoint.
The ending to my previous post was flawed.
You can't map Barbie to human proportions because in trying to get a handful of Barbie's proportions to match you get still others to not match. You decided to pick a proportion other than height to scale to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Barbie#Compariso ns_of_Barbie.27s_dimensions_to_those_of_real_women . gives a better statement of what I'm trying to say than I have.