Ryan Gosling wears a Rolex Bubble Back

Jacob Palmer exists to be looked at. In Crazy, Stupid, Love, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's 2011 comedy, he is the smooth bar-room operator who adopts a newly separated Cal Weaver, played by Steve Carell, and teaches him how to dress, stand, and talk to women. The costume is the character. In one of the film's sunniest scenes Ryan Gosling stands with his arms crossed beside Emma Stone in a bright house, and on his wrist, against a tan leather strap, sits a small yellow gold watch with a cream dial.

It is a Rolex Bubble Back, the early self-winding Oyster Perpetual that Rolex made in the 1930s and 1940s. The name comes from the caseback, which bulged outward to clear the automatic rotor inside. Writing for Oracle of Time, the magazine pegged Gosling's as "a yellow gold bubble back reference 3372, probably from the 1940s," and called the brown leather strap "a nice touch." Look closely at the still and the description holds: a warm gold case, a cream dial with painted numerals, a brown strap with pale stitching. Some watch spotters go further and read the dial as a "California dial," the half-Roman, half-Arabic layout that refinished Rolexes sometimes carried, though the more careful sources stop short of confirming it.

And there is a second watch. Oracle of Time noticed that in the film's earlier scenes Jacob wears "a bulkier Rolex Submariner reference 16610," a modern steel dive watch from the 2000s. So the man whose whole appeal is studied taste does not actually settle on one look. He wears a 1940s gold dress Rolex in some scenes and a contemporary steel Submariner in others, two very different Rolexes on the same character across one film. The role is remembered for the gold one. The Submariner was there earlier, easy to miss.