Elliot Page wears an unidentified watch

Drew Barrymore's directorial debut, adapted from Shauna Cross's novel Derby Girl. Bliss Cavendar is a small-town Texas teenager whose mother (Marcia Gay Harden) enters her in beauty pageants while Bliss would rather be anywhere else. She discovers a roller derby league in Austin and secretly joins, taking the name Babe Ruthless. The team includes Kristen Wiig as Maggie Mayhem, Barrymore herself as Smashley Simpson, and Juliette Lewis as rival Iron Maven. Alia Shawkat plays the best friend. Daniel Stern plays the supportive dad. It is a coming-of-age movie about choosing your own thing over the thing your parents chose for you.

The Casio Calculator watch has been around in various forms since the C-80 launched in 1980. The CA-53W-1 costs about twenty dollars and has a tiny eight-digit calculator that nobody uses for actual math because the buttons are smaller than a pencil eraser. The calculator is the point, though. It is a watch that declares itself interested in function over beauty, even though the function it advertises is basically useless. On a seventeen-year-old in a small Texas town who gets dragged to pageants by her mother, that is a statement.

Bliss is not making a fashion choice. She is making an anti-fashion choice, and there is a difference. The calculator watch is the exact opposite of everything her mother wants for her: black, plastic, cheap, masculine, and profoundly uncool in a pageant context. It is cool everywhere else. On the roller derby track, surrounded by women who chose their own names and their own bruises, the Casio fits right in. Barrymore, to her credit, understood that the props had to match the attitude.