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Tomb Raider
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Lightning crashed. The sky rumbled. Torrents of rain crashed against the windows. And through it all, two nerdy teens (Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith) use their computer to create a woman of their dreams (Kelly LeBrock). It happened in Weird Science, the 1985 teen comedy. It's happening again with the summer blockbuster Tomb Raider. A virtual fantasy girl leaves the computer and enters the real world in flesh-and-blood fashion.
Computer game adventuress Lara Croft is a 21st-century hybrid of the human and the machine. She is electronic flux. A digitized phantom. In cinematic terms, she is a sisterly update on the robot girl Machine Maria in director Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926). While most make-believe creatures are misshapen, disfigured and repulsive, Croft appears in front of her legions of teen-age male fans as something heaven-sent.
Personally, I find Croft's all-too-human arrival fascinating. I contemplate what philosophers like Nietzsche or Baudelaire might have said about this virtual idol. The joke is that while I consider her lack of a soul, her teen-age fans stay busy lusting after Croft's Playboy curves. It's clear this virtual idol offers a little something for everyone.
When it came to adapting the popular game Tomb Raider into a big-budget movie, there was no operation in a mysterious lab. No mad scientist threw a switch and created a shower of sparks. Cyber adventurer Croft simply ceased to be a collection of electrons and took the human form of actress Angelina Jolie. Croft used to be wholly electronic. Now Hollywood has transformed her into something biological and physical.
In Greek myth, Orpheus crosses Earth's interspace and enters the realm of the dead. Croft's journey is just as dramatic. After leaving the virtual reality of her computer screen, she inhabits Jolie's concrete body in the real-life chaos of a movie soundstage.
We live in a world where perfect models traverse virtual catwalks. Artificial re-creations of long-dead celebrities like Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne appear in TV commercials.
But Croft is something different, the product of a matrix. Her computer body, personality and family history are determined by computer coding text. She is the phenomenon of visual movement. She is a moving picture, an animated body without weight. Her only continuity as Jolie is that the computer screen and special-effects Hollywood movies both break the rules of gravity. The conundrum is that Croft already seemed so real. It feels old-fashioned to remake her as a human actress.
There is a literary tradition to artificial people. Isaac Asimov created a set of cyborg rules in I, Robot. Philip K. Dick deliberated the metaphysics of artificial life in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
But Croft is no golem or Frankenstein. She shares little with the gothic tradition of monsters resuscitated from the dead. Through the power of a joystick, Croft jumps, delivers kung fu kicks and climbs mountains. She flashes human abilities, human sensations and a distinct personality. She is a post-modern queen derived from data and information. From a pubescent boy's perspective, Croft is a comic book heroine brought to three-dimensional life.
Croft's computer-screen immortality is a given. She looks the same as when she was created in 1983. It's as if she's experienced some form of virtual embalming. Still, if there are to be Tomb Raider sequels, Jolie will age and eventually have to be replaced with a younger actress. That's what happens to flesh and blood. By comparison, Croft, the virtual idol, will stay exactly the same.
Artificial beings take the form of human cartoons in anime adventures like Ghost in the Shell. In Virtuosity, a computer-generated villain named Sid 6.7 (Russell Crowe) leaves cyberspace and wreaks havoc upon the city. Deranged scientists create artificial monsters in movies like Re-Animator and Frankenhooker. The films Videodrome and eXistenZ tap into virtual reality worlds to evoke psycho-sexual feelings. Croft stands somewhere alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator and the female androids of Blade Runner. In a perfect world, an artificial girl like Croft would date Pinocchio.
Schwarzenegger's Terminator is too sexless for Croft. Our female archeologist would be friends with Kyoko Date, the virtual celebrity based on a database of the average teen-age Japanese girl. Croft would learn tips by reading Idoru, William Gibson's 1996 novel about a romance between a pop star and virtual singer. She would stay busy answering the fan mail from her 1,000-plus Web sites. In the history of the female vamp, Croft's popularity puts her in the league of Cleopatra, Salome and Judith.
The phrase "Artificial Intelligence" was coined in the year 1956 during a two-month conference at Dartmouth College. In an era that created Robby the Robot, it's safe to say they never imagined a virtual idol like Croft.
In the movie, Jolie probably has memorized all of the details of Croft's make-believe history. She's learned the joystick stunts and karate moves. She wears Croft's clothes and imitates Croft's appearance. The resemblance between Jolie and her virtual character is uncanny. The unanswered question is whether Jolie knows how to act like a cybergirl. Her dilemma is how to act like she was invented. For inspiration, Jolie only has the benefit of computer coding.
Hers is a strange, new world. ©
