Life & Mortality Quote by Nicolas Roeg

Roeg is diagnosing a cultural reflex: the moment form shifts, fear kicks in, and in a mass-media ecosystem that fear now travels faster than the work itself. Coming from a director whose films (Dont Look Now, Performance, The Man Who Fell to Earth) made disorientation into a narrative tool, the line reads less like a grumpy industry complaint and more like a warning about how audiences are trained. When you teach people to buy recognition, you quietly unteach them how to watch.

The bite is in his causal chain. Fear isnt just a byproduct of novelty; its produced, managed, and monetized. Marketing, in Roegs framing, isnt neutral communication. Its a sorting machine that converts the unknown into a liability. Because marketing must promise something legible, it privileges templates: the sequel, the reboot, the genre sticker, the trailer that explains the movie before the movie can. That demand for the familiar doesnt merely follow taste; it manufactures it, then points to it as proof.

The subtext is about power. Invention requires room for misrecognition, for the first viewing where you dont know what youre looking at yet. Marketing wants the opposite: instant comprehension, instant positioning, instant consensus. Roeg is also implicitly defending form as meaning. If you change the form, you change what can be felt and thought. The acceleration he notes anticipates a world where algorithms and pre-sold IP compress risk even further, making the avant-garde not scandalous but simply unmarketable.