Amanda Pays wears a Timex

Deep in the bay the crew calls the Swamp, a chisel cracks the first safety deposit box off a safe they hauled out of a sunken Russian ship. The dead men's effects spill across the bench: wallets, a wedding ring, a pocket watch, a handful of wristwatches. Bowman starts an inventory. Elizabeth Williams turns one of the watches over and reads it off in a single word: "Timex." Amanda Pays plays Williams in Leviathan, George P. Cosmatos's 1989 deep-sea horror, where a mining crew on the ocean floor opens a drowned Soviet wreck and brings its secret home.

For a one-word gag, it carries thirty years of advertising. Timex built its name on a single promise, "it takes a licking and keeps on ticking," the line it ran from 1956 behind John Cameron Swayze, who strapped the watches to outboard-motor propellers and paint mixers and once an elephant and showed them still running. In one live test the watch tore loose into the tank, and Swayze ad-libbed that it was probably down on the bottom, still ticking. The pitch worked: by the end of the 1950s, one of every three watches sold in America was a Timex.

So Williams stands in a station on the ocean floor, holding a Timex that really did end up on the bottom, fished out of a safe off a ship that went down with all hands. The watch that takes a licking sits in a box of things its owners did not survive to collect. Swayze sold a watch too cheap and too tough to kill, and Leviathan found the one place that promise turns grim: a Timex still keeping time in a drowned crew's effects, long after the men who carried it are gone.