Bernard White wears a Lexon Latitude Manager

In Mobil Avenue, the white-tiled limbo station between the Matrix and the machine world, a program in a sage-green suit stands across from Neo and tries to explain something a program is not supposed to feel. Bernard White plays him: Rama-Kandra, who has come to smuggle his daughter Sati to safety because he loves her, and who insists, gently, that even a program can act out of love. It is one of the quietest scenes in The Matrix Revolutions, built almost entirely around a man waiting for a train.

While he waits, he checks his watch, and the film gives the gesture its own close-up, the dial filling the frame in his hand. It is a busy little thing: a polished steel case, a cream dial with full Arabic numerals, a small sub-seconds register at six, a date window down near four, and an engraved rotating bezel marked off in minutes. The design matches a Lexon, the French house far better known for its desk clocks and travel alarms than for the rare wristwatches it occasionally made, which is an apt and slightly uncanny thing to hang on a program dressed as a human businessman. There is a joke buried in the dial, too. A rotating timing bezel and a date are exactly the things a being who lives outside human time, experiencing the world as code, has no earthly use for. He checks them anyway.