Peter Fonda wears a Nautica

Steven Soderbergh cast Peter Fonda as Terry Valentine knowing exactly what the audience would carry into the theater. Thirty years after Easy Rider, the actor who rode across America as Captain America walks into The Limey (1999) as a wealthy Los Angeles record producer with a much younger girlfriend and blood on his hands. Lem Dobbs wrote it as a lean revenge film, Terence Stamp's Wilson flying in from London to find out who killed his daughter, the trail running straight to Valentine. Soderbergh fractures the timeline and splices in footage of a young Stamp from Ken Loach's Poor Cow (1967) as Wilson's memory, which turns a genre picture into something closer to an elegy.

Valentine retreats to a house in Big Sur to wait out the man hunting him, and that is where the watch turns up, on his right wrist, on a brown edge-stitched calf strap, easy to miss under his loose layered look. It is a yellow-gold tank case with a white dial cut to the rectangular shape of the case, black Roman numerals, and a sub-register at six. The shape openly recalls a Cartier Tank Cintree, which is the point of a watch like this, sitting alongside a gold bracelet and a diamond ring, department-store-meets-real-money jewelry on a man who wants to read as old wealth. The brand resists a clean answer, landing closest to a quartz Nautica without ever quite settling there. That hesitation fits the object. David Chu founded Nautica in 1983 as a sportswear label, and its watches have always borrowed upmarket styling at accessible prices, exactly what a 1990s music man would reach for if he wanted the Cartier look without the Cartier. The watch keeps its anonymity about as well as Valentine keeps his.