Page 187 - Cyberculture and New Media

178 Cyborg Goddesses: The Mainframe Revisited
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organization approve her quest against evil, in the Cradle of Life and the
Tomb Raider.
Lara Croft can selflessly indulge into physical challenges to achieve
her goals, and quite successfully manages to stay alive. Accordingly, Lara
Croft movies turn out to be a display of extreme sports of all kinds. From
horseback riding, biking, jet piloting, parachuting, air gliding, hiking, martial
arts, scuba diving to Safari Lara Croft proves her aptitude in diverse areas of
extreme sporting. Despite such strenuous pursuits, Lara’s poise in social and
cultural matters repeats itself in emotional concerns. She rejects emotional
involvements, as if to reiterate the familiar code of honor of the quest epic
hero who chastely avoids temptations of all sorts. Lara’s distrust of men is
justified at each stage whenever another one betrays her. They each appear to
be more interested in material gains rather than in Lara’s higher ideals or her
love for the humanity. Terry Sheridan, a character in both the Tomb Raider
and the Cradle of Life is a temptation on Lara’s way to victory. Although he
is quite an able partner, and an attractive lover to fall for, he is a traitor of the
highest kind. Eventually in the Cradle of Life, during the chase for the
Pandora’s Box, Terry Sheridan perishes. Thus, Lara Croft stands out as a
quite stoic cyborg goddess who combines in one beauty, and toughness.
Lara Croft may appear free but she is a subject of her queen, who in
her turn is yet another symbolic carrier or vessel of the ideological state
apparatus with a cultural, technological twist of her own. In the theoretical
plane, this powerful and gender-laden weight of conceptual symbolism and
performance politics is actually part of all contexts from cyber environments
to queer terminology. Thus, it marks a decision in terms of individual
freedoms and loyalties in all dimensions.

7. Alice
As far as loyalty to duty goes, in the Resident Evil movies Alice is
similar to Lara Croft. However, Alice is a clumsy person. She is not prudent
enough. This fallacy eventually causes her secret negotiation with an
Umbrella Corporation’s Laboratory employee to bring the corporation down.
Alice’s husband Spence secretly tapes the conversation from distance and
traps her. Spence manipulates this secret information for his individual profit.
In this respect, Spence is the traitor just as Terry Sheridan is for Lara Croft.
Spence is not interested in protecting humanity against an equally
manipulative corporate giant. Therefore, Alice gets trapped, in between her
husband, and the corporation. Spence claims he does not believe in change.
He is more into exploiting the giant Corporation to the detriment of others’
well being. He says:

You…really believe that … people like him (indicating
Matt, the other idealist, and ironically the future victim of