Kyle MacLachlan wears a Hamilton Ventura

A college student named Jeffrey Beaumont finds a severed human ear lying in a field, and following where it came from pulls him under the picket-fence surface of Lumberton into something much darker. That is the engine of Blue Velvet (1986), which David Lynch wrote and directed. Kyle MacLachlan plays Jeffrey; Isabella Rossellini is Dorothy Vallens, a nightclub singer in the grip of Dennis Hopper's monstrous Frank Booth; Laura Dern is Sandy, the detective's daughter. Dean Stockwell turns up as Ben, lip-syncing Roy Orbison's 'In Dreams' by lamplight in a scene that should not work and entirely does.

On Jeffrey's wrist is a Hamilton Ventura, gold-plated with a black dial on a black leather strap, and it is thirty years out of its time. Hamilton built the Ventura in 1957 as the world's first electric, battery-powered watch, its case an asymmetric shield designed by Richard Arbib that broke with everything watchmaking had done before; Elvis Presley wore one in Blue Hawaii in 1961, which fixed it in the culture. Hamilton had been a conservative Lancaster, Pennsylvania firm since 1892, and the Ventura was its leap. On a college student in 1986 it reads as deliberate retro, a 1950s shape on a wrist three decades later, which fits Lynch's habit of viewing contemporary suburbia through a 1950s lens.