I Spent 24 Hours Watching The Clock

“It’s like a fellow I once knew in El Paso. One day, he just took all his clothes off and jumped in a mess of cactus. I asked him that same question, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘It seemed to be a good idea at the time.’” —Steve McQueen, The Magnificent Seven (1960)

Watching the entirety of Christian Marclay’s The Clock is one full day of nonstop collisions: between conceptual and physical experiences of time; between narrative and abstraction; and, in my case, between the naively aspirational (It would be cool to see all 24 hours!) and the coldly practical (What happens when I have to pee?).

Presented in a darkened gallery furnished only with a 21 × 12' screen and three rows of white IKEA couches, The Clock is a 24-hour montage of roughly 12,000 film and TV clips that deal, either explicitly (a watch or clock is shown) or obliquely (the sun sets), with the passage of time. It’s also a functional timepiece in its own right, synchronized with the local time wherever it’s shown. The effect is as addictive (“just one more minute”) as it is paradoxical—you’re losing all sense of time while being constantly reminded exactly what time it is.

When I proposed sitting through one of MoMA’s 24-hour screenings and writing about the experience, I envisioned a stimulating, if disorienting, immersion in cinematic representations of time, resulting, perhaps, in a lighthearted disquisition on durational video art through the lens of so-called endurance art, maybe with a cheeky nod to past examples in these same galleries. Turns out I should have been thinking about a big mess of cactus, and the fact that my mouth—to paraphrase a line from Top Gun (1986), Dazed and Confused (1993), et al.—was writing a check my 50-year-old ass would have to cash.

What follows began at 6:45 p.m. on the Winter Solstice, December 21, which turned out to be the longest night of the year both literally and figuratively.

Guarded Optimism/Peaking Early (7:00 p.m.–midnight)

Our special 24-hour screening didn’t start until 7:00 p.m. (I went in 15 minutes early), so I’ve already been up for nine hours. In researching methods for staying awake, I’d found that most of the legal options would be either unavailable (fresh air, sunlight, movement and stretching) or prohibited by gallery rules (water, healthy snacks, coffee, staring at my phone). None of the wakefulness threads on Reddit had recommended a dark room filled with couches. Luckily, anxiety is an effective stimulant, which comes in handy for the first five or so hours.

The vibe on screen is also anticipatory, excited. There’s dinner prep and aperitifs, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman spruce up for a party (Eyes Wide Shut, 1999), Daniel Craig and Eva Green spar over evening wear (Casino Royale, 2006), various other James Bonds fix drinks and check watches. Cocktails and cigarettes abound. We first hear a phrase that will become a winking clarion call: “Look at the time!”

The gallery is warm and at full capacity, and the feeling of bonhomie—lots of laughter, and spontaneous applause as recently deceased personalities (Gena Rowlands, Maggie Smith, Alain Delon, Donald Sutherland) show up—is tinged with tension as the standing-room-only folks turn envious eyes toward us couch-sitters. It’s like an uncomfortable family gathering where your hyperactive uncle has the remote control.

9:00 comes and goes, and strange tensions emerge. Zombies and cat people and Saw movies jockey with Bing Crosby in White Christmas (1954). In Time After Time, one of many time-travel movies we’ll encounter time after time, a prostitute realizes her prospective client is Jack the Ripper. The dark night of the soul has begun.

As midnight approaches, the countdown(s) begin(s), though New Year’s revelry doesn’t appear to be on the menu. We are breathlessly racing against time, and toward death: a pair of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations (The Raven, 1935, and The Pit and the Pendulum, 1961) make appearances, as giant razor-tipped pendulums inch ever closer to their respective victims. Even the torture devices are time references. Minutes tick by as we wait for last-minute clemency calls from governors. The stroke of midnight is a cacophony of bells and violins. In The Stranger (1946), Orson Welles is impaled by a clockwork soldier. In V for Vendetta (2005), Big Ben—the closest thing The Clock has to a “main character”—explodes.

At 12:01 a.m., in Gone with the Wind (1939), Clark Gable soothes young Cammie King. It was just a nightmare. Little does he know….

The Stuff of Nightmares (midnight–7:00 a.m.)

The first five hours have flown by but my body finally betrays me: I have never been so thirsty. The commotion when I stand up is nearly comical, as exhausted standing-roomers lunge for the vacant seat.

I return, refreshed, to find that the active enforcement of so-called VIP seating has petered out, and in order to sit I will have to initiate some poor soul’s ejection from couch-land. And that’s how my pathological need to avoid uncomfortable social situations leads to a far more uncomfortable physical situation: I spend the next five hours seething and miserable on a portable stool, a victim of my own timidity and bad posture.

Despite the stool, I am now a member of the standing-room-only crowd. It turns out there are two kinds of standers. Those who have been here the whole time are barely watching the screen, keeping at least one eye hungrily trained on the couches, playing a twitchy game of three-dimensional chess with the seated, the other standers, and their own internal battle between discomfort and stubbornness. This is suffering for art. Then there are the new arrivals, the late-nighters just popping in to check out the scene, smelling of cocktails. They’re younger, fresher, but as long as we keep between them and the couches, they’re not a threat. Their bladders will take them out of the game soon enough.

It’s well after 1:00 a.m. and on screen things are getting more horizontal. People are preparing for bed, preparing for sex, having sex, having sex interrupted by phone calls, enjoying celebratory cigarettes. There is a troubling amount of postcoital Woody Allen. Those who aren’t abed are on the run, perpetrator or victim. In A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (a personal favorite, from 1987), Patricia Arquette, menaced by sleep, downs a mouthful of instant coffee with Diet Coke. We all groan with envy.

My growing discomfort and anxiety are echoed onscreen in the shifty eyes and manic paranoia of the hunted and the criminal. I’m vibing with the desperate saps of film noir. On the bright side, the pain in my lower back is keeping me from dozing off. Meanwhile people are still trickling into the gallery. Who are these people? The post-cocktail crowd is joined by older insomniacs, vocally agitated by the still-occupied couches.

Just after 3:00 there’s a break in the tension: GZA and RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan appear on the screen, in Coffee and Cigarettes (2003). They get the biggest applause—by far—of the entire 24 hours.

By 5:00 a.m. extended sequences of dreams and nightmares match the crowd’s ebbing energy. Jimmy Stewart’s head floats around (Vertigo, 1958), Marcello Mastroiani wafts through the air (8 1/2, 1963), a river of blood pours out of an elevator (The Shining, 1980). We’re in film-clip cloud-cuckoo-land.

Then the alarm clocks start.

I have to give it up for this crowd. They’ve shown a physical dedication to spectatorship typically seen at outdoor football stadiums in the Rust Belt. But now the sun is rising and every damn alarm clock in cinema history is ringing and reality is setting in.

Naturally, Christian Marclay had anticipated this moment of clarity: “You’re aware of when you started looking at it, and you know how much time you’ve spent there—so you have to make choices. These choices make you hyper-aware, and you become an actor in the film. People become totally aware that their life is linked—their life is synched—with this thing.”¹

Thankfully, even the Clock superfans start choosing self-preservation and sleep...and I am soon back among the couches.

Lost Time/Running Late (7:00 a.m.–noon)

Dear lord, how is 7:00 a.m. only the halfway point?! The thinning crowd allowed me to step out for some water and food, but now I’m seated and sated—and it seems like everyone up on the screen is luxuriating in comfy sheets or being served breakfast in bed. Sometime after 8:00, amid all the shaving and showering and steaming cups of coffee, I am dead asleep.

…and wake up in a panic matched by the people onscreen—late for work, late for school, catching trains (so many trains), unprepared for exams. Bruno Ganz stands on a clock tower that tells me it’s after 9:30 (Wings of Desire, 1987).

I’m still in a hypnagogic fugue state when I realize that the museum has reopened to the public and the gallery is filling up again. But these aren’t the hardcore Clock-heads I’m used to. Most stay for 20 or 30 minutes. They greet friends, look cheerful. Some have the nerve to look at their phones. I won’t have to fight these normals for couch space.

Now the only faces I recognize are “up there”: Anna Karina, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Juliette Binoche, Denzel Washington. Westclox, General Electric, Casio, Timex. And Big Ben. Big Ben will haunt my dreams.

Clockwatching (noon–7:00 p.m.)

Noon arrives with all the clamor of midnight, but none of the doom. The looming deadlines and obligatory High Noon (1952) showdown build to a climax of…lunchtime! Now everyone from Nicolas Cage (Moonstruck, 1987) to Faye Dunaway (Mommie Dearest, 1981) is eating steak, and I realize I’m famished. I break for water, coffee, trail mix, a fresh T-shirt, and a toothbrush.

The meta-study “Severe Sleep Deprivation Causes Hallucinations and a Gradual Progression Toward Psychosis with Increasing Time Awake” (Frontiers of Psychiatry, 2018) found that subjects’ “perceptual distortions, anxiety, irritability, depersonalization, and temporal disorientation started within 24–48 h of sleep loss.” I can offer anecdotal confirmation. It is after 2:00 p.m. and I have been awake for 28 hours. I’m not hallucinating (yet) but I definitely hate everyone and, although I’m literally sitting in a clock, time is meaningless. One hour flies by and the next is like spending an afternoon at the DMV. Paul Hogan pretends to tell the time by looking at the sun (Crocodile Dundee, 1986) and I laugh for the first time in hours.

“Each man measures his time; some with hope, some with joy, some with fear. But Sam Forstmann measures his allotted time by a grandfather’s clock, a unique mechanism whose pendulum swings between life and death, a very special clock that keeps a special kind of time—in the Twilight Zone.”

There are many recurring “characters” in The Clock: Charles Bronson’s fastidious assassin from The Mechanic (1972), Rod Taylor as H. G. Wells in The Time Machine (1960), Gillian Anderson’s Dana Scully in The X-Files. The most affecting is Sam Forstmann (Ed Wynn), from the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “Ninety Years Without Slumbering”; he’s an old man who believes he will expire if he stops winding a clock. I know exactly how he feels. And amid all the ticking bombs and alarm clocks and witty confluences, Marclay does too: “The Clock is a sad piece, in a way. It is a piece that confronts you with your mortality.”² Thinking about time is thinking about time running out.

At 3:12 we’re told that the 3:10 to Yuma is running late in 3:10 to Yuma (2007). I find this so funny I start to worry about my brain. At 4:59, Jack Nicholson stares at his office clock, waiting for quitting time (About Schmidt, 2002), and I realize I still have almost two hours to go. Soon after, fog or smoke appears to roll off the screen and into the gallery. My notes are useless after this point. The last image I remember is Louise Fletcher leaving the insane asylum in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). This seems appropriate in retrospect.

At 6:44 p.m. sharp, lacking the energy to run, I stumble to my office to gather my suitcase and head to the airport. I have to catch a flight home for the holidays. One small blessing: I wasn’t forced to emerge into the merciless sunlight—what the comedian Larry Miller called “god’s flashlight”—that typically awaits all-night revelers.

Around 9:00 p.m., nearing the 36-hour mark, I’m drinking an ill-advised glass of wine in the airport lounge and staring fixedly at a bank of TV screens. I don’t see a single clock.

Special thanks to MoMA’s Visitor Engagement staff for facilitating this endeavor and, more importantly, for their good humor and commiseration throughout.

Christian Marclay: The Clock is on view at MoMA through February 17, 2025.