Daniel Craig wears a Swatch Keith Haring

For most of Queer, Daniel Craig's wrist is bare, and the reason is in his pocket. Craig plays William Lee, an American expat modeled on William S. Burroughs himself, drinking and drifting through 1950s Mexico City in pursuit of Eugene Allerton, a newly landed ex-serviceman played by Drew Starkey. Luca Guadagnino directed Justin Kuritzkes's adaptation of the Burroughs novella, with Jonathan Anderson, then creative director of Loewe, designing the costumes, and A24 premiered the film at Venice in September 2024. Through most of the picture, the prop master Matt Marks has explained, Lee carries a Marvin watch with a broken strap in his pocket, a brand the production chose after finding it advertised in a 1950 Sears Mexico catalogue.

The Swatch arrives only at the end. In the film's Two Years Later coda, Lee, now an old man, lies on a bed in a dream that mirrors a night he shared with Allerton; on the floor a snake bites its own tail, and on Lee's wrist is a mid-1980s Keith Haring Swatch with a snake on its dial, thirty years out of period in a film that also scores the 1950s with Nirvana, Sinéad O'Connor, and New Order. The anachronism was not a costume-department decision. Marks has said the Haring Swatch was Craig's personal watch, not provided by the props department, worn just for old Lee in the closing scene.

The other watches in the film were chosen to sit quietly in period. Jonathan Darracott, Bonhams's global head of watches, has described them as nondescript, inexpensive, and meant to be modest, and Allerton's 1944 Gruen Veri-Thin Pan American pilots watch points at the military-intelligence work of Lewis Marker, the real man Allerton is drawn from. The Haring Swatch runs the other way. Eric Wind, the vintage watch dealer, counts the Haring models among the most valuable and interesting vintage Swatches, identifiable from a distance because of the artwork. In the dream that closes the film, the snake on the dial faces the snake on the floor.