In City on a Hill, Jackie Rohr understands the sleazy magnificence of a two-tone Rolex
Luke Benedictus“Am I supposed to hate Jackie Rohr, because I f*cking love him!” That post on Reddit sums up the general feeling for everyone’s favourite anti-hero in City on a Hill. If you haven’t watched it yet, don’t miss out. Set in the 1990s, this gritty drama hits like The Wire with a Boston accent, unfolding on a giant canvas to take an unflinching look at power, race, urban corruption and family ties. And the most captivating character is undoubtedly Jackie Rohr.
Brilliantly played by Kevin Bacon with a malevolent twinkle in his eye and a permanent smirk, Rohr starts off as a crooked FBI agent with zero moral scruples. Lupine and haggard, he’s a constant source of foul-mouthed, chain-smoking menace, prowling the streets fortified by regular bumps of cocaine and slugs of liquor from his ever-present hip flask.
Particularly in the first two series, Rohr is a double-crossing figure of almost Dickensian evil. He kills people in cold blood. He sneers at a dying colleague in the back of an ambulance (“the last thing that you’re gonna see in your lousy life is my ugly f*cking face’). He lies and cheats and knocks back more bourbon. In short, he is an absolute prick of a man and an utterly magnetic screen presence.
It doesn’t hurt that Rohr is also an absolute quote machine, whose dark past and terminal cynicism informs his nicotine-stained brand of street wisdom. As he observes with withering disdain of his beloved Boston: “What used to make this city great was that it was run by bad men who understood they were bad.” Meanwhile, despite punctuating his sentences with expletives, Rohr is also an erudite man. When someone questions his depraved motivation, he replies with a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “I am in blood/Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,/ Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
Visually, with his slicked back hair and greying moustache, Rohr cuts a figure of almost cartoonish sleaze who, in his ankle-length leather coat and oversized sunglasses, looks like a throwback from the previous decade that the show is based in. This point is made explicitly, too, as Rohh is warned following more heavy-handed behaviour that it’s “not 1983 anymore”. Even the name “Jackie Rohr” sounds like a linguistic echo of “dinosaur”
“He’s very backward in a lot of ways,” Bacon said of Rohr’s character in this interview. “Even his mindset is way more 10, or 20, years before. For instance, I went with this moustache and moustaches were not really popular in the ’90s. That was a time when everybody was really into shorter hair and being clean-shaven. It’s a way of showing that he’s a guy that’s really going kicking and screaming into the future. He really wants – and likes – the status quo. He likes the power that it gives him.”
It’s fitting therefore that Rohr wears a watch that could hardly be more resonant of the ’80s unless it was wearing shoulder pads made from Rubik’s Cubes. In the third series, while threatening some hapless student for information, we get a close-up of Rohr’s wristwear – a watch that appears to be a two-tone Rolex Datejust with a gold fluted bezel.
According to the horological cognoscenti, two-tone’s image is meant to have been rehabilitated of late. In the real world meanwhile, two-tone retains a slightly disreputable edge that stems from its joyously gaudy, look-at-me swagger. Which is exactly what makes a bi-metal watch so great.
Two tone will never convey quiet elegance or whisper stealth wealth. It’s flashy and slightly kitsch, running about with far too many of its shirt buttons undone and pretending to be in that Duran Duran video on the yacht. While the rest of us plod through life, sidelining our dreams and apologising too much, two-tone is out there making highly questionable decisions and having an absolute ball. Packaged in its bi-metal combo of steel and gold, a Rolex Datejust is brash, louche and totally unapologetic. Just like the magnificently despicable Jackie Rohr.