Why Zima is a tragic character
And why his final piece is regression disguised as transcendence
Before I start roasting Zima, I'll have to confess that it's out of love. Zima Blue holds a special place in my heart and this story has been driving me crazy, especially since I'm so late to the party.
1. Zima is a puer aeternus archetype
I gotta explain to the best of my understanding the Jungian concept of the Self and Ego, and how these are experienced by artists in an unusual way.
What artists describe as a divine gift is essentially the same thing Jungians call “the Self”. If you’re a creative type you know what I mean — it’s the core of your being and the source of all the beauty you experience. It’s not exactly you, but a force that gives life meaning and propels you to create. The thing is that everyone has this force at their core — the artists’ Self is just a little quirky and extra.
Puer is a Jungian archetype/symbol that signifies childlike creativity, purity, curiosity, and vitality — basically your inner child. Because the artists’ Self is so unusual, they are often deemed “special”, and this, combined with childhood trauma, can result in an identity problem called puer aeternus a.k.a. the Peter Pan syndrome. The inner child is a necessary source of vitality and creativity — but it can turn against the person if it's out of control. Puer aeternus is a result of a delayed Self/Ego differentiation — in other words, the artist can’t differentiate between their "divine gift" and themselves — they identify with the gift and avoid adult life in fear of losing it. This results in a rich, overwhelmed inner life and an empty, unfulfilled external life. The puer is repulsed by ordinary life, identifies with extraordinariness, lives only in ideas, substitutes reality with fantasy, and is obsessed with concepts of “purity” and “origin”. Good examples in fiction are Peter Pan, the Little Prince, and as I believe, also Zima Blue. In Zima’s case, he experiences the Self as that specific shade of blue (his core programming), can’t differentiate himself from the blue, and subsequently wants to enclose himself inside it.
2. Zima's design and cybernetic modifications
He’s imposing, freed from bodily limitations, superhuman both physically and intellectually, all to divorce himself from humanity and ascend to the stars for inspiration. It's easier than staying on the ground and finding meaning among other people. My gosh, he's so tall dark and handsome, women fawn over him but he's not interested because he's just so above lowly human desire. How convenient — to be sexually wanted and remain asexual. To be an object of attraction without touching the vulnerability of it. A virgin sex symbol. A 7ft tall Ken doll. He can walk around butt-naked because his body is “purified” with cybernetic modifications. To be both desired and untouched by desire is a puer fantasy, because he can't accept all the pain and chaos that goes along with it.
This makes Zima an inverted image of the Little Prince, because the Prince at least admits his fragility. He admits to being broken and small. Zima’s inability to live a human life is disguised as being superhuman and above others. Both are essentially “too pure for this world”.
3. The portraiture period and failed human life
“The human form was too small a subject”, but a singular shade of blue wasn’t? What was it about ordinary life that repelled him so much? The canon explains his origin, but not necessarily how he'd gotten to the point of rejecting the world and choosing to live in abstraction. One would imagine unbearable alienation and lack of understanding among other people. The puer lives as his authentic self only in his mind — meanwhile his persona is either nonexistent or merely a mask that shields him from being exposed. How could he have explained his longing for the blue to other people, when at the time he'd been unaware of it himself? He must’ve suffered — so much so that it had driven him to abandon humanity and reach for the stars, instead. Everyone saw his exterior, no one truly saw his vision — so he decided to get rid of the persona entirely and show the world only his vision. Because there’s no separate Ego to identify with, only the Divine, Infinite Self, there is no point at which his art would be great enough — even the cosmic scale was insufficient. He would need to paint existence itself blue to satisfy his Self-enmeshed ego, and so he did.
4. What Zima's relation to his creator implies
This only applies to the Netflix adaptation, but it cannot be ignored — his creator is simultaneously his mother. Zima had canonically transferred his programming into a lab-grown human body before becoming a cyborg, and he looks almost like her twin. I conclude he must’ve gone out of his way and commissioned the body to look exactly like her. Not only had he lost his mother before being able to comprehend it — he’d never managed to even separate himself from her. His anima (the subconscious feminine in a male psyche) is so disintegrated that he seeks fusion with Eros (the feminine force that rules over relation and feeling) that’s frozen in the past. Eros for him is still bound to the mother (Yes, that’s some Oedipus complex type shit. No, it doesn’t mean he wants to bang her).
The animation's depiction of his origin screams unprocessed grief: the bittersweet, melancholic music during the swimming pool flashback, the reverence Zima talks with about his creator, not to mention the symbolic resemblance between the pool and a womb. The narrative implies that the blue is all Zima needs, but everything else says otherwise. My headcanon is that his core programming had gotten enmeshed with his unprocessed grief, to the point that the color and the mother are one and the same in his mind.
And notice how nothing else matters to him — the impact his art had on the world, how he inspired other people, and how much it cost him to accomplish so much. All of this has zero worth in his eyes — the only valuable thing is the abstract meaning and “inner truth”.
His final piece is a finalization of puer’s death pull. He succeeds — he returns to the womb, escapes embodiment, becomes pure abstraction, and encloses himself inside blue perfection. This is presented as abandonment of ego, but it actually preserves his ego, because he can opt out of existence and be revered forever in an infantile state where relation and friction don’t exist. He returns to the pool — but this time, nobody is there to upgrade him. There is no one to clean the tiles for.
5. How real mystics describe enlightenment
Mystics say that divinity is found in embodiment, not outside of it. Meister Eckhart, for example, says that detachment is actually existing in the world without holding onto your desires and fears, and a great deal of spirituals would say the same. Detachment means being present in life because you’re not afraid to risk pain. Creation is ongoing — there is no point at which a person is “perfected” or “finished”.
6. The interview with Claire is Zima's last brush with embodiment
The moment of touch isn’t grandiose just from Claire’s point of view (like, of course she is in awe upon meeting a mythical figure + he's fine af can you blame her). The visual language clearly implies this holds great significance for Zima as well. In the LD+R artbook, there’s a color script which includes a couple shots that didn’t make it to the final animation.
Pardon the quality, I don’t have the book myself.
There’s a reason this deleted shot is from Zima's POV, looking down at awestruck Claire. There’s a reason why the handshake is so uplifted, why it lingers on for so long. Her role isn’t just that of a narrator or a vessel for the audience. She is a witness. The only one who witnesses both Zima's Self and Ego. The only one given insight into both his art and his personhood. Note the moment they meet, she takes her sunglasses off and we see her eyes for the first time.
Whether the authors were aware of it or not, it's no coincidence that this gaze is female. Sophia/Eros signifies embodiment. Logos (the masculine element signifying meaning and structure, and the force that rules over Zima's life) remains hollow until it’s embodied. But Claire is used as a shortcut: she is given the task of presenting Zima's personhood to the world, after he departs and strips himself of a body. He's allowed to bid goodbye to embodiment and remain adored without actually facing it. And it's no coincidence there’s so much weird ass tension between them (I’m saying this fully aware of my shipping brain's bias). He's allowed to merely flirt with embodiment before dumping it for good. Because why expose yourself to the world when an insightful journalist can do it for you? That’s the problem: the puer desperately wants to be understood, but is too terrified of vulnerability to expose himself. After the dismantling scene, the whole audience is dumbfounded and she's the only one who's calm, melancholic — because she's the only one who had a glimpse into the person behind the art. And being seen in your entirety is what Zima had never been given.
To tie this all up, I'll refer to The Little Prince again and point out how similar its last visual is to the one in Zima Blue.
Notice the minimalism and emptiness of both images. Both protagonists are reduced to untouched concepts, solitary abstractions (the Prince — a star, Zima — a little bot). Both are surrounded by peaceful, barren emptiness. One is fixed above the world to be gazed upon, one is enclosed as an art piece to be admired. Marie Louise Von-Franz, one of Jung's students, described the Little Prince's last image as empty, because the puer can neither experience pain nor happiness — he's too terrified of both. Terrified of existing.
TL;DR — Zima needs to touch grass before saying shit about enlightenment.
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