The Brooklyn Rail

I first saw The Clock in 2013 at SFMOMA. I walked into the room and ended up rescheduling an appointment so I could keep watching. More than a decade later, I find Christian Marclay’s film just as compelling. It raises so many big philosophical questions but also smaller random ones, the kinds that curious children giddily ask the adults in their lives. This film has made me wonder what makes quarters of the hour so special. Numbers that end in 00, 15, 30, or 45 get all the glory. My meetings all start or end at those times. So do weddings, funerals, concerts, and haircuts. Watching the film, I was struck by the ringing of chimes and bells every fifteen minutes and also by how many audience members waited until these intervals to leave.

The 2:00 p.m. hour begins eight minutes before 2:00 p.m., with a clip from Spider-Man 2 (2004). Messenger Peter Parker, played by Tobey Maguire, is instructed to deliver a stack of pizzas across town. The shop manager implores, “You are my only hope, alright? You have to make it in time.” We see Peter racing across Manhattan, interspersed with other non-Spider-Man film clips that add to the suspense: European-style clock towers chiming 2:00 p.m., people pouring into a bank reopening after lunch, and elementary school classes being dismissed for the day. A moral overtone is established with clips showing people being judged for drinking alcohol so early in the day. Peter finally delivers those pizzas at 2:03 p.m.. “You’re late,” snarls the receptionist. “I’m not paying for those.” Three minutes, we soon learn, is the difference between having a job and unemployment. Yet time keeps moving during this fast-paced hour, which, in case the viewer missed it, is underscored by the “Time Movers” truck that flashes onscreen at 2:04 p.m. Sure, there are attempts to suspend time: the announcement of a time capsule that school children will create and bury—“Wow! Woah!” they exclaim—and a clip from Hook (1991), in which Dustin Hoffman playing Captain James Hook encourages young Jack to destroy his father’s pocket watch, intoning, “May time stand still, laddie!” Destroying someone’s watch is akin to destroying the person. “When my clock stops ticking, I’ll die,” is the premise of “Ninety Years Without Slumbering” (Twilight Zone, 1963). And that’s almost what happens during Harold Lloyd’s famous scene from Safety Last! (1923), in which the silent film star dangles from the hands of a clock on a skyscraper facade. Later in the hour, the ticking of a clock doubles as the soundtrack for medical vital signs.

It is a superpower to innately know the time or control it. The title character of Crocodile Dundee (1986), played by Paul Hogan, surreptitiously steals a glance at his sidekick’s watch before dramatically squinting at the sun and announcing, “It’s 2:20. We better get started” to an unsuspecting and duly impressed New York reporter. In other clips, we see magicians wearing multiple watches under their long sleeves and mid–twentieth-century men in suits awestruck by a newly invented computer that accelerates their watches. Could time be elastic? In an early clip from Happy Accidents (2000), Sam, played by Vincent D’Onofrio, muses, “One’s emotional state determines the flow of time. It speeds it up or slows it down…. Don’t bad things always seem to last longer than good ones? But good things seem to just fly by….” He is talking about falling in love; perhaps there are multiple reasons that the heart is known as a “ticker.”

People can lose their humanity by being reduced to a single time. In Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite (1995), sex worker Linda Ash, played by Mira Sorvino, greets Woody Allen’s character, Lenny, with, “Are you my three o’clock?”

Much has been written about Marclay’s musical talents. At the most basic level, it seemed to me that the sounds of time passing—ticking, chimes, ringing phones, and trains chugging along or whistling—have an enhanced aural presence in The Clock. I was intrigued by how confused I became when an audience member’s cell phone rang. Could it be that Apple’s “Circuit” ringtone was part of the film? And that made me think about the representation of technology in the film more generally. A few unusual looking telephones appear during the 2:00 p.m. hour. Would there eventually come a time when audience members will not understand some of these references, both visual and heard? I thought back to a clip shown at 2:10 p.m., taken from the apocalyptic sci-fi thriller Knowing (2009). The scene is set in a Lexington, Massachusetts school in 1959, and students are asked to put on their “thinking caps” and draw a picture of the future that will be placed in the school’s time capsule. Might Marclay’s The Clock function as a time capsule? Even now, watching it, we see that when it comes to the stuff of everyday life, the clock keeps ticking and change is fast-paced indeed.