Worn & Wound
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer Features Carefully Curated Vintage Hamilton Watches, Sourced from Collectors
Oppenheimer, the new film by Chrisopher Nolan, opened this weekend. And if there’s one thing we know we’re going to get with a Nolan film, it’s a very loud soundtrack. But if there are two things, the other is probably the use of a handful of Hamilton watches throughout. The director has forged a partnership with the brand going back to Interstellar in 2014 and Tenet in 2020. Both of those films used Hamilton watches that were customized in some way, and played integral roles in the telling of the story. For Interstellar, the “Murph” watch allowed Matthew McConaughey’s astronaut character to communicate through time and space with his daughter back home on the farm, thereby imparting secrets of quantum physics that would later save the planet (or something). And in Tenet, a Hamilton BeLOWZERO was custom fit with a backwards running timer, because, well, it would take too long to explain. But the point is, these watches played a real role in Nolan’s storytelling. They were props, but not just props. A vintage Cushion B, Lexington, and Endicott, worn by Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer Oppenheimer is a whole other kettle of fish, however. Unlike Tenet and Interstellar, Nolan’s latest is based on actual events, specifically the building and detonation of the first atomic weapons. Without sci-fi flights of fancy and what we anticipate will be some adherence to the historical record, there’s no need for the watches in the film to perform parlor tricks – they ...
