Josh Brolin wears a Timex Camper

Out in the west Texas scrub, an antelope rifle slung over one shoulder, Llewelyn Moss lifts a small dark watch up toward the sun and studies it. He is not checking the time. He is reading the shadow the hands throw across the dial to work out which way he is facing and how much daylight he has left. Josh Brolin plays Moss, a welder and Vietnam veteran who, a few minutes later, will follow a blood trail to a drug deal gone wrong in the desert and walk off with two million dollars in a satchel. From that point on Anton Chigurh, the killer Javier Bardem plays with a cattle gun and no expression, is coming for him.

The watch is a Timex Camper, the cheapest honest thing in the movie. It is a small field watch, around 34mm, with a dark green dial, a matching fabric strap, plain Arabic numerals ringed by a second twenty-four-hour track, and a thin lollipop seconds hand sweeping the center. Timex has sold versions of it for under fifty dollars for decades, which is exactly why it belongs on Moss. He is a man who hunts for the table and welds for a living, and he wears a watch that costs about what a tank of gas does.

The Camper comes out of Timex's long line of plain military-style field watches, the kind built to be legible at a glance and cheap enough that breaking one costs you nothing. There is no luxury anywhere on Moss, and the Coens know it. The most valuable object in No Country for Old Men is the money in the satchel. The cheapest is a Timex on Moss's wrist, which he uses out in the desert like a compass.