The Brooklyn Rail

It’s dinner time, curtain time, movie time, drink time, and bedtime for the youngest of us. It’s time to dress for a date, have cocktails, sex, blurred vision, and paranoia. It’s time for a car wreck and the hangman’s noose. And it’s time to kvetch about an overcooked meatloaf. Or so Felix Ungar (Jack Lemmon) complains to Oscar Madison (Walter Matthau) at 8:02 p.m. in The Clock. The now classic scene from the 1968 film, The Odd Couple, is the longest continuous clip in the 8:00 p.m. hour of Christian Marclay’s twenty-four-hour masterpiece, and it effectively sets up what follows: “I said I’d be home at 7:00 p.m.” “It’s 8:00.”

Marclay is especially attuned to wordplay, and he must have appreciated Neil Simon’s title for his original 1965 play and the film adaptation. The simple phrase could easily serve as a metaphor for how Marclay’s video functions as a provocative meal of seemingly incompatible ingredients—think Felix and Oscar—blended together in a profoundly satisfying and often amusing way. As it does in every hour, the 8:00–9:00 p.m. jump-cut meatloaf served by Marclay includes black-and-white and color film and TV excerpts that are chopped up, seasoned, and reformed. The Clock has little discernible narrative. This artistic recipe provides opportunities for cineastes and the rest of us to tell ourselves how well or poorly versed we are in film culture. Can we quickly identify and distinguish Vincent Price from Gregory Peck, Barbara Stanwyck from Rita Hayworth? While playing this game, we are at first wracked with anxiety: what do we recognize or think we should? After an hour or so, this angst passes, and we learn to relax and enjoy the video’s brilliant mélange.

For many of us, it is the sound editing that makes The Clock so satisfying. Marclay and his editor, Quentin Chiappetta, slide the audio track from one source under many others; and, at times, they add sound elements that were not present in any of the collaged film clips. These transitions, or “connecting bridges” as Marclay describes them, bind thousands of elements together and evoke the artist’s many years performing in New York as a cutting-edge DJ. They wake up and add flavor to the work’s disparate elements, as critical to the cohering structure as breadcrumbs soaked in milk—the secret to a well-made meatloaf.

If, as Marclay has expressed, The Clock is “a memento mori,” what might it memorialize? At first it is primarily the lost art of auteur filmmaking; in quick time, it also becomes a reflection of our own lost youth and the death of generations of our screen friends and family. The fabulous twenty-four-hour tale—it does not have a real beginning or end—is told by the minute-by-minute glimmerings on the faces of pocket watches, wristwatches, clock towers, grandfather and desk clocks. For this viewer, the 8:00–9:00 p.m. hour is a mostly pleasant reminder of childhood in the 1960s and early 1970s: movie nights with scores of young crushes and TV with my parents and much older siblings (biting the hands that fed them and expressing their generation’s rage). Our fraught weekend family time was accompanied by my mother’s Saturday night meatloaf, eaten again cold (and to me, far tastier) for lunch on Sunday. Like Felix Ungar in The Odd Couple, my mother was a neatnik and a stickler for promptness in every corner of her life, and she made a weekly fuss about us all being on time for Saturday night dinner followed by feature films on television.

Watching Marclay’s The Clock brought these memories to consciousness, over meatloaf (not a madeleine). My mother was a frugal homemaker who seemed to fancy the idea of meatloaf as a tasty family meal made of the week’s leftovers. As the food writers Frank Bruni and Jennifer Steinhauer note, “Meatloaf … was often a sort of culinary scrapheap … It was a way to stretch protein. It was a way to use up excess vegetables. It was a ragtag orchestra of ingredients on the verge of expiration.” My mother’s version may well have been clipped and adapted from one in Betty Crocker’s first cookbook (released and acquired in 1950 when my mother was expecting her first child). One might charitably call it her Larousse, as it was to our Midwestern home’s cuisine what the famous French encyclopedia was to other more continental families. Here is my 98-year-old mother’s recipe retrieved from her kitchen drawer during the run of The Clock at MoMA in March 2025.

Meat Loaf

• 2 ½ lbs. ground beef
• 2 eggs
• 1 small onion, grated
• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup stale bread or breadcrumbs
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 tablespoon pepper
• 1 cup tomato paste
• 1 cup water

Soak breadcrumbs in milk, then add to meat with other ingredients and mix well.

Place in buttered loaf pan and add tomato paste and water.

Bake for an hour + in the oven at medium heat; baste often.

Serve sliced, thinly (just like The Clock).