I don’t know how those extremely short blurbs for movies on TV streaming platforms are generated. Are they thrown together by the work experience kind or are they just farmed out to AI, which then pretends to be the work experience kid?
Whatever the case, it doesn’t appear to be anybody/thing that is experienced in discourse around cinema. Look at this example, for the 1937 thriller Sabotage, which on Amazon Prime is described as “Hitchcockian”. Now anyone who spends too much time talking about movies knows what it means to describe one as Hitchcockian. You know the tropes: paranoia, heights, voyeurism, a blonde, a MacGuffin. Anything that reminds you of films directed by Alfred Hitchcock: Brian de Palma, Claude Chabrol, Parasite, Witness for the Prosecution, Charade. Crucially, however, it’s not actually applied to films that Hitchcock himself made. They’re just called Hitchcock films.
And this is a problem, because Sabotage was actually made by Hitchcock, based on Conrad’s The Secret Agent but not to be confused with an earlier film he made called Secret Agent or a later one called Saboteur. So it’s not Hitchcockian. To describe it as such is to take a Baudrillardian detour in which the representation, the copy, the fake occupies the space that should be taken by the real, which in itself sounds like another Hitchcock trope, mistaken identity. And AI is supposed to know this because it’s got access to the whole internet, at least a slice of which is occupied by grumpy, middle-aged bloggers arguing about how to describe thrillers directed or not directed by Hitchcock; and the work experience kid is supposed to know this because he or she’s got a phone and can look it up.
The logical solution of course would be to hand the task over to the grumpy, middle-aged bloggers who actually know what they’re talking about. Although the problem there is that with knowledge comes opinions, and we’d be at pains to tell the viewers that 80 per cent of the films on Amazon Prime are rubbish. Not including Sabotage, which is one of his best pre-Hollywood outings, but I guess that would be little comfort to that nice Mr Bezos.
So, “Hitchcockian” it is, and always will be, I guess.
