We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.

Hitchcock’s remark wryly observes a modern urge to curate ourselves for posterity. The “compulsion” to bury time capsules suggests both anxiety about being forgotten and a desire to control how the future will interpret us—compressing a complex present into a deliberately chosen set of artifacts. The line also hints at Hitchcock’s broader skepticism about appearances and narratives: what we leave behind is never neutral, but staged, edited, and symbolic. In that sense, a time capsule resembles a film—an arranged selection meant to produce a particular impression in an audience that cannot verify what was left out.