Bob Geldof wears an Ingersoll Mickey Mouse

The camera holds on a child's watch. Early in Alan Parker's Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982), a close-up fills the screen with a tarnished dial: Mickey Mouse in red shorts and yellow gloves, his arms reaching out to mark the hours, the words INGERSOLL MICKEY MOUSE printed beside him. It belongs to Pink, the burned-out rock star played by Bob Geldof, who spends most of the film shut inside a hotel room sifting through the wreckage of his life.

The watch is older than the man wearing it. Ingersoll began making Mickey Mouse watches in 1933, under license from Walt Disney, and they landed at the right moment. The company was in serious Depression-era trouble, and the Mickey watch became one of the decade's runaway sellers, the kind of object that moved by the hundreds of thousands and helped pull Ingersoll back from the edge. The piece on screen is a vintage one from that first run, the Art Deco cushion case collectors came to call the "five notches."

So the prop is a real 1930s children's watch, worn by a wealthy adult rock star. The film's flashbacks keep returning to Pink's childhood, to a father killed in the war, a smothering mother, and schoolteachers who humiliated him.