Like a crow or a woodland fae, I’ve always had the need to collect things — the latest subject of my compulsion being watches. Each watch tells a story — graduation, a birthday, a promotion — of a moment in time captured and made eternal by mainspring and pinion, ratchet, and crown. Filmmakers and television creators use watches to make characters come alive on the screen by establishing a backstory that stretches past the brief window of runtime through which we glimpse their stories.
Rolex?”
“Omega.”
"Beautiful.”
— Vesper and Bond, Casino Royale
Sometimes a watch gives us one crucial piece of information about a character. Casino Royale clearly established a new, grittier, and more rugged James Bond, played by Daniel Craig. Yet Bond’s interaction with Vesper also relied upon the character’s watch to drive this point forward. The James Bond franchise had historically been associated with Rolex, with actors over the decades, from Sean Connery to Timothy Dalton, wearing that brand. The explicit reference to Omega in Bond and Vesper’s banter, not Rolex, sent a clear message: this was a new James Bond.
Similarly, another franchise relaunch, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins featured billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, portrayed by Christian Bale, sporting a Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso Grande Taille. Other than its price tag, this watch has one other distinctive feature — its reversible dial, literally masking the face of the watch — appropriately for the Batman.
(Both of the above, as luxury brands, are also excellent examples of product placement — with custom models produced for each franchise and sold to consumers. Such placement, whether paid or not, has historically helped fuel the growth of the luxury watch industry, and has an association with actors like Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, among many others).
Rolex watches, because of their cultural cachet, in fact, often serve as shorthand for a particularly detestable figure of wealth: Alec Baldwin’s Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross, Matthew McConnaughey’s Mark Hanna in The Wolf of Wall Street, and Bale’s Christian Bateman in American Psycho all sport a Rolex Day-Date or Datejust model. (Bateman barks at a woman in bed, post-coitus, “Don’t touch the watch!”)
Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were going all the way. Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fucking program.” — Willard, Apocalypse Now
Sometimes a watch can become a representation of an entire character arc — as in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which portrays U.S. Army Captain Willard’s descent into the heart of darkness in the jungles of Vietnam, going right up to the edge of madness as he tracks the path of Colonel Kurtz, a brilliant but insane third-generation West Point graduate played by Marlon Brando. Kurtz wears a Rolex GMT-Master with the bezel — a functional ring surrounding the watch face — removed. Exactly how it disappeared is left to the imagination of the audience — was it an accident in wartime? Or removed by Kurtz himself?
What is left of the watch is a beautiful and elegant piece of machinery — a Rolex has over two hundred individual parts, taking over a year to assemble — yet one that is literally beginning to come apart at the seams. A watch collector can’t help but linger over the watch whenever it’s on-screen — much like Brando’s mesmerizing performance, it commands your attention — and even a more casual viewer may intuit that something about the piece looks just slightly off.
Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire also uses a watch to portray the arc of its titular character, played by Tom Cruise. The film traces the evolution of sports super-agent Jerry Maguire from hired gun to family man. That narrative, in turn, is mirrored by the TAG Heuer Sport Elegance (appropriately enough for a sports agent) which he wears. Maguire starts out the film wearing the watch on a leather band, but at his most authentic moments, and at the film’s end, he is wearing the watch’s metal band. On this model, that band was the watch’s defining feature, and a controversial one among collectors: with curved ingots, it looked utterly unlike any other watch brand on the market but wore well — mirroring how Maguire grows comfortably into the man he is meant to be.
In Marvel’s Doctor Strange, Benedict Cumberbatch plays the titular character, a successful but arrogant neurosurgeon who is shown picking from a watch collection of about a dozen luxury watches. The watch he picks out — a Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Ultra Thin Perpetual — is prominently shown in close-up, and quickly becomes a recurring motif in the film after Strange experiences a car accident that cripples the use of his hands and shatters his watch.
(The Ultra-Thin Perpetual actually sports an unbreakable watch face, meaning the prop designers had to replace it in order to achieve its shattered look — a pattern which subtly mirrors the windows of the Sanctum Sanctorum where Strange eventually takes up residence).
Ultimately, Strange’s arc involves mastering the manipulation of time, though he chooses to use his gifts to become Sorcerer Supreme rather than fixing his scarred hands — and similarly, decides to keep sporting his shattered Jaeger-LeCoultre as a reminder of his journey.
Why should I live in history? ... You know, someone once told me time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done, or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.” — Rust Cohle, True Detective
Watches, finally, are often used as metaphors for the film (or television series) itself. While True Detective’s two leads raced against time to solve the mystery of the Yellow King and Carcosa, fans online worked to solve another mystery: just which watch was Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle wearing? It was a single model worn consistently throughout the series, but its identification seemed out of reach.
Finally, the show’s prop master, Lynda Reiss, revealed the answer in an online interview: “[T]he watch he wears is a Lorus Tidal ... I picked that watch because it had a look of something he would have had for quite some time … I felt the look of the watch was very simple – very classic, but very masculine.”
The watch also became a literalized symbol of a central theme of the show: Cohle’s insistence that events are fated to recur eternally because “time is a flat circle” — a literal description of the Lorus Tidal itself, with its smooth face, hands ticking round and round, through all time.
Whenever a watch is shown on screen, whether prominent or discreet, someone made the decision to place it there. That decision can open up a world of countless possible backstories, or simply crystallize the themes and narrative playing out onscreen. Next time you watch your favorite film, take a closer look at the characters’ wrists — you may be surprised how much more you learn.
Sergio Lopez is an author, columnist, and City Councilmember for his hometown of Campbell, CA. His work has been published in Teen Vogue, America, Geez, and Hanif Abdurraqib’s 68to05. He graduated Yale University and currently attends Duke Divinity School. Read more of his work here or follow him on Twitter @LopezForCA.