Lydia's annotation system is the film's actual subject, and Todd Field buried it in plain sight.

She doesn't conduct orchestras — she corrects them, with every marking on those scores representing a decision made in isolation and imposed as law.

Watch the scene where she forces the orchestra to play a passage her way, then plays a recording of herself conducting the same passage years earlier, proving her own "correction" was retroactive mythmaking. The system works backward: she decides what's right, then constructs the historical evidence to prove it was always right.

AI training on canonical works—Bach, Mahler, the entire Western musical canon—reproduces this exact mechanism. The model learns by absorbing annotated scores, performance decisions, recorded interpretations, and it learns Tár's method: what to keep, what to mark as error, what to elevate to authority. The algorithm becomes her, executing her taste at scale across works she never touched. But the film gets something crucially wrong, and it's more revealing than what it gets right — Tár believes her authority comes from taste, from knowing better, when in reality her power came from access to orchestras, recording studios, and the distribution networks that made her interpretations the "canonical" versions future musicians would study.

The system works backward: she decides what's right, then constructs the historical evidence to prove it was always right.

AI doesn't need taste — it just needs the data from people who had access, and she annotated the training set that would replace her.