Joseph Gordon-Levitt wears an IWC Pilot's Watches

Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Arthur sits low in a chair, a small black notebook open on his knee and a pen loose in his hand. On his left wrist, catching the grey daylight, is a round watch with a black dial on a steel bracelet. It is an IWC Pilot's Watch Mark XVI, a plain and legible aviation tool watch, and this quiet shot is where you can actually see it.

The Mark XVI keeps its most interesting feature where you cannot see it. Inside the case sits a cage of soft iron that shields the movement from magnetic fields, and that cage is the reason the caseback is solid steel instead of a window onto the works. The front is all business: a matte black dial, luminous Arabic numerals, a date at three, a single anti-reflective sapphire crystal. IWC introduced the watch in 2006 and retired it in 2012 when the Mark XVII took over, so the one on Arthur's wrist was a current model when the film was made.

Arthur is the point man, the one who does the research and keeps Cobb's team on schedule, and the scene he is remembered for is the opposite of this still one. In the hotel dream layer he fights a projection up and down a corridor as the gravity drains away, a sequence Nolan shot without computers by building a hundred-foot hallway inside a giant rotating drum. Gordon-Levitt trained for about two weeks and did most of the tumbling himself. You never get a clear look at the watch in any of that, and for the clear look you have to wait for him to sit down.