Bruce Willis wears a Lancet Trench Watch

The gold watch in Pulp Fiction is the entire engine of Butch Coolidge's story. Quentin Tarantino introduces it through Christopher Walken's Captain Koons, who delivers a long monologue to a young Butch explaining how his father hid the watch through years in a Vietnamese prison camp rather than surrender it, and then gave it to Koons to bring home. By the time Bruce Willis is a grown man throwing a fight and risking his life to go back to his apartment, the audience understands what he is risking it for.

The watch is a yellow-gold Lancet trench watch from World War I, with faded red numerals on a white dial, a sub-seconds dial at six o'clock, worn on a steel expanding bracelet. Lancet was a short-lived brand made by the Langendorf Watch Company of Switzerland. It is the right object for this story: a military timepiece passed from man to man across decades and wars, its value having nothing to do with what it would fetch and everything to do with being proof that Butch's father existed and kept a promise.