"The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death"
About this Quote
Cinema is a machine for rehearsing the end. Morrison’s line doesn’t flatter film as escapism; it indicts it as a beautifully engineered coping mechanism. The “appeal” isn’t just spectacle or romance or plot. It’s the way movies let us flirt with annihilation from a safe seat, turning death into something paced, framed, scored, and therefore temporarily manageable.
The intent feels characteristically Morrison: part prophecy, part provocation. He’s yanking the curtain back on why audiences crave disaster epics, noir fatalism, war films, horror, even melodrama. The screen offers controlled exposure therapy. We watch bodies fall, lovers vanish, worlds implode, then the lights come up and we’re still here. That little resurrection is the product being sold.
The subtext is also about immortality by proxy. Film preserves faces, voices, gestures - a ghostly archive that keeps the dead performing. For a rock star who turned himself into a myth while living, that’s not abstract. Morrison’s era was saturated with televised war, political assassinations, and a youth culture newly aware that the future wasn’t guaranteed. Movies didn’t merely distract from that anxiety; they metabolized it into narrative, giving dread a beginning, middle, and end.
What makes the line work is its bleak economy. It reduces an entire industry to a single human panic, then dares you to disagree. If you do, you’re probably still proving his point.
The intent feels characteristically Morrison: part prophecy, part provocation. He’s yanking the curtain back on why audiences crave disaster epics, noir fatalism, war films, horror, even melodrama. The screen offers controlled exposure therapy. We watch bodies fall, lovers vanish, worlds implode, then the lights come up and we’re still here. That little resurrection is the product being sold.
The subtext is also about immortality by proxy. Film preserves faces, voices, gestures - a ghostly archive that keeps the dead performing. For a rock star who turned himself into a myth while living, that’s not abstract. Morrison’s era was saturated with televised war, political assassinations, and a youth culture newly aware that the future wasn’t guaranteed. Movies didn’t merely distract from that anxiety; they metabolized it into narrative, giving dread a beginning, middle, and end.
What makes the line work is its bleak economy. It reduces an entire industry to a single human panic, then dares you to disagree. If you do, you’re probably still proving his point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Morrison, Jim. (2026, January 14). The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-appeal-of-cinema-lies-in-the-fear-of-death-7882/
Chicago Style
Morrison, Jim. "The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death." FixQuotes. January 14, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-appeal-of-cinema-lies-in-the-fear-of-death-7882/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death." FixQuotes, 14 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-appeal-of-cinema-lies-in-the-fear-of-death-7882/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.
More Quotes by Jim
Add to List
