Nicolas Cage wears a Rolex Submariner

Benjamin Franklin Gates has organized his entire life around American history. He is named for a Founding Father. His family has chased a treasure left by the framers for two centuries. In National Treasure (2004), Jon Turteltaub's gleefully silly adventure, Nicolas Cage plays Gates as a man who will steal the Declaration of Independence itself to read the invisible-ink map he is convinced is on the back of it. And on the wrist of this American-history obsessive is a Swiss watch.

The watch is a Rolex Submariner, the Sub Date, reference 16610, with a gloss black dial and an aluminum bezel, the last of the aluminum-bezel Submariners before Rolex went to ceramic in 2010. It is a diver's watch, born in the early 1950s as a tool for going underwater. You would expect a man this devoted to the founding of the republic to wear something American, an old Hamilton or a Timex. Gates wears a Swiss dive watch and never once explains why. The film never asks him to.

There is one scene where the watch does actual work. Mid-heist, on the run, he ducks into an Urban Outfitters and finds he needs a hundred-dollar bill to read the next clue. The cashier wants something for it. So Gates takes off the Rolex and slides it across the counter. "Here. I have this diver's watch," he says. "It's called a Submariner. I dive with this, it's actually quite valuable." He gets his hundred dollars, reads his clue, and gets the watch back. A man who would not let go of a two-hundred-year-old secret hands over a Rolex without a second thought, because the secret is the only thing he was ever really keeping.