Ron Livingston wears a Belair Day-Date

In the fall of 1999, Mike Judge gave the American office worker a hero who hates his job, and gave him a wristwatch to match. Peter Gibbons, played by Ron Livingston, is a software engineer at Initech, a company whose chief activity seems to be the migration of paperwork from one cubicle to another. The camera finds his watch in a tight insert during a workday lull, and what fills the frame is a plain steel dress watch with a white dial, printed Arabic numerals, and a day-date window at three o'clock that reads "FRI 12."

Look closely at the dial and the brand resolves: Belair, in a small cursive script below twelve. Below center the dial prints "3 ATM." This is not an aspirational watch. Belair is a low-cost American private-label name, the sort of watch sold at modest prices rather than coveted, and that is precisely why it suits Peter, a disaffected programmer who would no sooner buy a Rolex than enjoy a Monday. The irony, of course, is in the silhouette. A round case, a white dressy dial, a day and a date together at three: it apes the look of the Rolex Day-Date, the President, at private-label money. A President for the cubicle, on the wrist of a man who has stopped pretending to care.

And then there is the date itself. The window reads Friday the twelfth, which in a film whose entire subject is dreading the workweek and living for the weekend is a small, deliberate joke. Peter glances down at it in the middle of a corporate day. The watch is telling him exactly how far away the weekend still is.