Jack Nicholson wears a Bell & Ross

Sean Penn directed The Pledge (2001), and it is one of the bleakest things he has made. Jack Nicholson plays Jerry Black, a Reno homicide detective who, on the very day of his retirement, promises a murdered girl's mother that he will find the killer. He does not let it go. He buys a rural gas station near where he believes the man will strike again, settles into the life of a small-town shopkeeper, and waits, and the film never quite tells you whether the instinct driving him is genius or delusion.

The evidence still catches him in that second life: Jerry in a fishing vest and a ball cap, leaning on the counter of his bait-and-tackle store, writing something on a notepad with a half-smile. On his left wrist is a round watch on a dark strap. The dial gives up nothing on screen, no logo, no model, just a plain round case in the warm light of the store.

What can be said about it is narrow. The Clock, the art project that indexes films by the time their clocks show, logs Jerry Black's watch as a Bell and Ross. That brand was founded in 1992 on the idea that a watch should be legible first and decorative second, which is at least the right temperament for a man who has reduced his life to watching a road and waiting. Beyond the name, the watch keeps its specifics to itself, exactly as it does on screen.