In ‘Industry,’ Watches Are a Window Into Whitney Halberstram’s Soul
Industry has long been a show more concerned with creating characters that feel real rather than playing into protagonist/antagonist archetypes. The show has never been particularly concerned with casting judgment on the series’ central character, Harper Stern, for her myriad personal and legal indiscretions, and it’s also gone to tremendous lengths to humanize hapless nepo baby Henry Muck. It’s saying something, then, that the series’s titanic fourth season—which concluded last night—was built around the show’s first true villain, Whitney Halberstram. Halberstram, chillingly played by Max Minghella, doesn’t give much away as his villainy builds, but his choice of watches speaks volumes.
Show creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have never been afraid to wear their influences on their sleeves (they heavily name-checked Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton as the basis for the fourth season), and consistent with that, Halberstram was an homage to Patricia Highsmith’s legendary literary conman Tom Ripley. (In a fun twist, 1999’s The Talented Mr. Ripley was written and directed by Minghella’s father, Anthony.) Like Ripley, the more time we spend with Halberstram, and the more we see him twist his form to suit the expectations of whoever he’s standing in front of, his charade becomes all the more visible.
Industry costume designer Laura Smith has long had a savvy eye for watches and excels at using them to tell a character’s story. Halberstram’s watch collection proves no different. “Whitney’s watch choices were about elements of mirroring people he wanted to draw close,” she tells GQ. His impressive lineup of watches isn’t just the mark of a tech bro flexing his (apparent) success but woven into the fabric of whichever skin he’s trying to inhabit at any given moment.
He sports a Hublot Big Bang in early scenes with Jonah, played by Kal Penn, Halberstram’s cofounder at the fintech startup Tender. Hublot is a relatively young brand, and the Big Bang is exactly the sort of ostentatious timepiece a braggadocious tech dude might choose. Later in the season, a TAG Heuer Monaco is visible on Whitney’s wrist, as archetypally masculine a watch as there is. The Monaco, of course, is famous as the watch worn by Steve McQueen in the 1971 motorsports flick Le Mans, and generations have lusted after it as they’ve sought to emulate McQueen’s brand of effortlessly cool, daring masculinity. Whitney sports the watch when he first meets Harper, and because his sexual orientation (like everything else about him) is undefined, it feels significant that he’d wear such a masculine-coded timepiece.
