Steve Carell wears a Rolex Submariner

Mark Baum is a fictional name for Steve Eisman, the FrontPoint Partners hedge fund manager who bet against the subprime mortgage market and won. Adam McKay directed The Big Short from a screenplay he co-wrote with Charles Randolph, adapting Michael Lewis's book about the handful of people who saw the 2008 financial crisis coming and made money from it. Steve Carell plays Baum as a man who is perpetually furious at a system he profits from, morally outraged and financially complicit at the same time.

The Rolex Submariner on Carell's wrist is the default watch of New York finance. In a world where every hedge fund manager, trader, and banker wears one, the Submariner stops being a status symbol and starts being a uniform. On Baum, who is described in the source material as loud, combative, and constitutionally incapable of small talk, the Submariner is less a choice than a convention. He wears it because everyone in his world wears one. It is a steel sport watch with a black dial, ceramic bezel, and 300-meter water resistance, and it costs around $8,000 at retail. In the conference rooms and Las Vegas hotel suites where most of The Big Short takes place, it is furniture.

McKay's film broke the fourth wall, used celebrity cameos to explain financial instruments, and won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Through all of it, the Submariner sat on Baum's wrist, keeping time on the countdown to a catastrophe that made him rich and left him disgusted.