The Ego Death of Zima Blue
Revisiting Robert Valley’s nine minute master piece, and the inevitability of turning inwards.
Robert Valley’s style of animation continues to be the most distinct art style I’ve seen in a while, and Zima Blue was my introduction to his work. I then watched Ice, another episode from the Love, Death and Robots anthology, and decided then that I’d watch whatever he made. For some his art style is ugly but for me it is charming. It frames the worlds of his stories in sharp lines and stretched angles, and his characters are always given an opposing eye, either from the viewer or from the other characters.
I saw someone on the Love, Death, and Robots subreddit refer to the style of Zima Blue as ‘technoir’.
The technological advancement of Blade Runner’s dystopian Los Angles and the seedy and bleak near future of The Terminator fuse together to make Zima Blue, an admittedly more vibrant display in the episode than in the book of the same name.
Zima Blue is a colour that is incomparable to both the sea and the sky, as the narrator says. ‘Zima Blue is a precise thing’. The colour is found mostly in Zima’s paintings but occasionally you see it on his hands and on his face, as though a constant reminder of his past which at this point in the story is unknown. This was the first thing that drew me to the story; the intensity of colours. Some parts are grey and bleak, and others are sharply contrasted between shadow and light.
In Zima Blue, a renowned artist known for his endless search for true meaning builds his reputation through spectacle. In the short story by Alastair Reynolds, Zima describes his work as ‘huge and soulless’ much like Zima in Valley’s animation, who seems to have accepted the value of his work as a part of him long retired.
Zima invites a journalist he’s rejected many times to tell the story of his past and present work, including his final piece, though this finality is only that to everyone but him. Zima’s final work is located in a pool where he submerges his mechanical body and begins to disassemble himself, until finally he is a ‘crude little machine with barely enough intelligence to steer itself.’ Zima, it turns out, was just that. A cleaning bot designed to scrub the walls of a pool tiled entirely in Zima Blue.
It’s a story like this that I truly find unforgettable. What the short story did well was only enhanced by Valley’s adaptation. A silo of one man’s experience that feels all the more real when you turn your eyes to the world just outside. Zima’s final performance was his own ego death, leaving behind the burgeoning desire for greatness in lieu of simplicity. “It was all I knew. All I needed to know.”
The idea is quite simple. Technology’s desire for advancement created a fully conscious being that can barely distinguish itself from its human counterparts. Because of this, its search for fulfilment becomes grander and grander until there is nowhere left to go but to the beginning.
As someone who doesn’t care to understand AI, this was the thing that did it for me. Wrapped in grainy shadows and bright, contrasting colours was the true harm of giving too much power to things that don’t need it. Robots, and technology in general, have proven to be in the wrong hand time and time again, and though I don’t know much about it I can empathise with the fear of dissatisfaction that Zima feels.
The constant search for purpose and true happiness, how those things are often in opposition to capitalism and mainstream society. At the end of Reynolds’ short story, Carrie, the journalist, admits that she still visits Zima’s home long after he’s returned to his original form, as do others who ‘feel that the artist has something else in store… one last surprise.” In Valley’s adaptation, the onlookers at Zima’s final show are worried, aghast as he shuts down the brain that gave him unimaginable wealth and fame.
I try not to think too hard about these cosmic crises because as you can imagine, the spiral into existentialism is not very fun. Recently though I’ve been exploring what freedom would look like if given the chance to access it. Is it freedom in money? In death? In fame? In love? I’ve seen many theories say that Zima returning to the pool is him finding freedom in his childhood, where he sheds the intensity of complex human emotions for the simple joy of a task well done. I do agree to some length. I think children are the most innocent forms of life we have, and I have many opinions on bad parenting, which also plays a part in Zima’s evolution.
Zima is created by a young woman who fills her home with robots, but comes to favour him. She continues developing him until his brain evolves far past the capabilities of a cleaning bot. When the woman dies, Zima is passed down through generations of people that continue to modify him until he is a fully formed being. Children are often the sum of their parents and those around them, so I would agree that the simplicity of childhood might be a factor. But I also think this theory disregards the complexity of Zima’s wants.
Zima has been alive for over a century. He has experienced the breadth of humanity there is and does not want to explore it any further. He no longer wants to convene with the cosmos to satiate his curiosity. He wants to go back to the singular purpose that he was made for. The job of a human being takes on many forms throughout a lifetime, and none of those have appealed to him, nor do we know if they ever did. Where the theory of childlike simplicity might work, his desire for regulation does not. A child would not want to be stuck cleaning a pool all day.
I don’t think we’ll all get enslaved by fully conscious robot humanoids (I’m looking at you I, Robot), but I do think the prevalence of AI being so deeply ingrained in popular culture will drive us back into ourselves inevitably. Already the rise of turning to offline means of connecting with others is showing how limited AI can truly bring people together, if it even does at all.
Okay you actually convinced to watch all of it