Joey King wears a Timex Originals

Early in White House Down, before the building starts coming apart, eleven-year-old Emily Cale stands on a White House tour between her father and the guide, a small white-dialed watch on her wrist. Emily is the family's politics obsessive, the kid who films everything, which is how a mercenary later catches her recording the attack and takes her hostage. Her father, John Cale, is a Capitol Police officer played by Channing Tatum, there to impress her and to interview for the Secret Service the same afternoon. Roland Emmerich made this the second of two 2013 films about a paramilitary crew seizing the building. Olympus Has Fallen had opened on the same premise three months earlier; White House Down followed in June on a budget of about $150 million and grossed $205 million worldwide, a thin return for the price.

The watch is a Timex, most likely the Originals Classic Round, reference T2N791. It is a plain quartz: a steel case, a white dial with thin stick markers in rainbow colors, INDIGLO backlighting, and a white leather strap, the legible and hard-wearing kind of watch a parent buys a kid who will not baby it. Timex descends from the Waterbury Clock Company of Connecticut, founded in 1854, and made its name on watches cheap enough to abuse, the brand behind the torture-test commercials and their promise that it takes a licking and keeps on ticking. The T2N791 sells for well under a hundred dollars.

That suits the film's one grounded instinct. In a movie where the president fires a rocket launcher out of his own limousine and the building never stops exploding, the steadiest character is the kid, and her cheap Timex rides out the whole siege on her wrist. Emily is also the one who stops the attack: as fighter jets close on the White House to carry out an airstrike, she gets outside and waves a presidential flag until the lead pilot aborts. The watch that saves a life, though, belongs to someone else. President Sawyer, played by Jamie Foxx, takes a point-blank bullet from the rogue head of his Secret Service detail, played by James Woods, and lives because it lodges in a pocket watch in his breast pocket, one that had once belonged to Abraham Lincoln.