Samuel L. Jackson wears a Geneva Gold-Tone Wristwatch

Geneva is the kind of watch you find spinning on a rack at a mall kiosk, the sort that costs less than the lunch you eat while shopping for it. Samuel L. Jackson wears one as Jules Winnfield in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994). It might be the most perfectly chosen cheap watch in the movies.

The watch is not gold. It is painted to look gold. The band and the face both got a coat of gold paint over base metal, and the face is set with synthetic diamonds where the numbers should be. On the back someone scratched "E101." By the time it reached auction the paint had worn thin, scuffed and tarnished, showing the dull metal underneath. Real gold does not flake off. This was a costume, built to be seen from a few feet away and no closer.

That is the joke Tarantino seems to have understood. The other watch in Pulp Fiction is Butch Coolidge's, the gold heirloom that Captain Koons, played by Christopher Walken, carried through a prisoner of war camp and hid in a place you do not forget. Tarantino gave that watch a long monologue and a backstory. Jules's Geneva has none. He wears it loading a pistol, and again at the diner with his hand flat on Marsellus Wallace's briefcase, and he never once looks at it. He is a man who will shoot you over what is in that case and could not tell you the time.

Then the painted watch did something the script never imagined. One example sold through Prop Store out of the Planet Hollywood collection, estimated at three to six thousand dollars. Another, missing its crystal, sold at Julien's for sixty-four hundred against an estimate of one thousand. A watch worth maybe twenty dollars, worth thousands now, for one reason. It spent a few minutes on Samuel L. Jackson's wrist. Butch's watch was precious because of where it had been. Jules's is precious for the same reason. The history just happens to be ours.