Vitals

Denzel Washington as Doug Carlin, ATF agent and Marine Corps veteran

New Orleans, Spring 2006

Film: Déjà Vu
Release Date: November 22, 2006
Director: Tony Scott
Costume Designer: Ellen Mirojnick

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

On this Fat Tuesday, flash back to 20 years ago when the observance set the scene for Tony Scott’s sci-fi crime thriller Déjà Vu. The movie itself is fine, but it’s a shining example of Denzel Washington’s uncanny ability to elevate any material with his considerable charisma and talent.

Déjà Vu begins with an explosion aboard the Sen. Alvin T. Stumpf passenger ferry which killed 543 people—mostly civilian families and U.S. Navy personnel en route New Orleans’ first Mardi Gras celebration following Hurricane Katrina. A task force across federal agencies and local police includes ATF Special Agent Doug Carlin, given the explosive nature of the act and the responsibilities covered by BAFTE’s final letter.

Informed by his own ethos that “everything you have, you lose, right?”, Carlin maintains his solid reputation when he discovers “ampho” under the Crescent City Bridge, thus determining that the explosion was indeed a criminal act. The mystery compounds when Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), initially believed to be a victim based on her burns, is reported to have washed up on shore just minutes before the 10:50 AM explosion.

FBI Special Agents Jack McCready (Bruce Greenwood) and Paul Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) introduce Carlin to their newly formed investigative unit, Frontline—a groundbreaking, time-warping system informed by a spatial wormhole discovered by the cheeky Dr. Alexander Denny (Adam Goldberg) that allows the unit to surveil anywhere in real time four-and-a-half days later.

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What’d He Wear?

Doug Carlin’s comfortably oversized wardrobe was requested several years ago by BAMF Style reader Ryan. Doug anchors his personal style to an unstructured sport jacket with a soft, olive-brown sueded leather shell. Cut with the relaxed proportions typical of the mid-2000s, the single-breasted design features natural shoulders, a roomy torso, and a clean, ventless back below a horizontal yoke. Notch lapels roll to the top of a high three-button front, which Doug alternately wears completely open or fully buttoned.

Though casual in spirit, the jacket borrows just enough from traditional sports coat architecture to elevate it—including a trio of patch pockets (one at the chest, two over the hips) and two-button cuffs—which feels less like formal tailoring and more like a Y2K-era reinterpretation of leisure jackets.

Doug arrives at the explosion site later on the same day (February 28, 2006), wearing an untucked beige short-sleeved shirt—also shapelessly oversized in harmony with the suede jacket. The beige shirting has a textured lightness suggestive of linen or a linen/cotton blend. The shirt has a large point collar, elbow-length sleeves, breast pocket, and a front placket with seven matching flat 2-hole buttons, worn with the top one or two left undone.

Doug maintains those voluminous proportions with his light blue denim “dad jeans” that he wears for the first day’s investigation, styled with the traditional five-pocket arrangement.

Throughout the next three days as Frontline’s system catches up to the day of the explosion, Doug keeps his style consistent in another oversized sports shirt. This mottled pale-blue camp shirt was designed to be worn untucked, with an informal loop collar that he buttons to the neck during Claire’s funeral. It also has a breast pocket, and inverted box-pleated back, and a straight hem with side vents.

Doug’s brown flat-front trousers have a short-piled finish suggestive of moleskin. These have side pockets, jetted back pockets, plain-hemmed bottoms, and belt loops for his black leather belt with its silver-toned square single-prong buckle.

Doug’s plain-toe derby shoes with their smooth black leather uppers are considerably more utilitarian “cop shoes” than the dressier derbies one would wear with a suit. The round black laces are pulled through five sets of eyelets, and he wears black socks.

Doug always wears a plain black T-shirt as his undershirt. Made from either cotton or a cotton/polyester blend, these short-sleeved T-shirts have a round crew-neck visible beneath the open necks of his beige and blue sport shirts.

Doug arrives at the explosion site wearing the narrow-shaped sunglasses that were fashionable through the early-to-mid-2000s, styled with an aviator-style rectangular frame and dark lenses. The gold filigreed ring on his right hand features what appears to be the U.S. Marine Corps logo in relief against a black enamel-filled square surface, perhaps prompting McCready to ask “so he’s a former Marine?” (Though actual USMC vets would oppose the word “former”, as “once a Marine, always a Marine.”)

Doug dresses his left wrist with the spacefaring Swiss-made Fortis Classic Cosmonauts Chronograph ref. 630.22.141, introduced in 1994 when it became the first watch officially sanctioned for use by the Russian Space Agency (ROSKOSMOS), flying on MIR and ISS missions for nearly a decade to follow. The first series was powered by a Lemania 5100 movement inside a 38mm case, before these were swapped out to a 42mm case housing the ETA 7750 movement from 2003 onward. You can read more about these Fortis space watches in Zach Kazan’s article for Watch & Wound.

Doug appears to wear the original Cosmonauts Chronograph with its brushed steel 38mm case and fixed tachymeter bezel, encircling a black dial with luminous Arabic hour markers and hands. Three sub-registers are positioned directly against the dial at 6, 9, and 12 o’clock, plus two windows for a day-date complication at 3 o’clock. The brushed steel three-piece link bracelet matches the case.

Doug pulls on a coat and hat for his initial investigation of the Sen. Alvin T. Stumpf explosion. The dark-gray cotton twill fitted baseball cap has “Dillard University” embroidered in a low-contrasting black thread across the front two panels of the six-paneled crown—each detailed with a ventilation eyelet. Considered the oldest historically Black university in Louisiana, the New Orleans-based Dillard University was founded in 1930 but incorporates earlier institutions established immediately after the Civil War.

Doug’s olive-green polyester trench coat serves the functional purpose of protecting him against the rain, perhaps incongruous but adding a sci-fi/noir element to his otherwise conventional mid-oughts casual look. This knee-length lightweight coat follows the classic trench coat design with its 8×4-button double-breasted front reinforced by a full waist belt, broad ulster-style collar, shoulder epaulets, and straps that close with a single button against each cuff.

When Dr. Denny arranges to transport Doug back in time to attempt to save Claire, Doug has to reduce his mass inside the time machine, so he sheds all of his clothing save for that black T-shirt and his blue striped cotton boxer shorts.

After Doug awakens in the hospital a few days “earlier” on Fat Tuesday (February 28 again!), hours before the bombing, he spies a fellow patient’s two-toned slate-and-stone windbreaker, striped blue Izod polo, gray slacks, and tan suede moc-toe four-eyelet derby shoes—stealing all but the shirt as his attire through the final act.

Following his gunshot wound to the shoulder, Doug accompanies Claire back to her apartment, where she patches the wound and lends him one of her boyfriend’s jackets—a blue denim chore coat with a tan corduroy collar. This thigh-length coat has five brass-finished tack buttons up the front, separating the symmetrical design of two open-top chest pockets and two hip pockets.

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The Gun

Doug carries a stainless Smith & Wesson Model 642 snub-nosed double-action-only (DAO) revolver in an ankle holster on the inside of his left leg. There’s some real-world precedent for this choice; ATF agents had been authorized to carry similar Smith & Wesson Model 940-1 revolvers since the 1990s, replacing earlier options such as the Smith & Wesson Model 64 or the semi-automatic SIG-Sauer P230.

Smith & Wesson commemorated the company’s 100th anniversary in 1952 with the introduction of the Centennial line of compact revolvers featuring fully enclosed hammers, descended from the pre-war Safety Hammerless design. The original all-steel Centennial and its alloy-framed Airweight counterpart were later designated the Model 40 and Model 42, respectively. The Centennial series quickly became a favored police backup gun. Chambered in .38 Special—the same cartridge used in many service revolvers—it offered a concealable, snag-free profile, and in the case of the Airweight, significantly reduced weight, while its five-round cylinder maintained the slim proportions expected of a discreet secondary weapon.

The line evolved to include stainless variants such as the Model 640, along with the aluminum-framed Model 642 Airweight, which debuted in 1995. Around this time, Smith & Wesson also produced the Model 940—uniquely chambered in the 9x19mm Parabellum round typically reserved for semi-automatic handguns but equipped with moon clips for use in a revolver, allowing LEOs with 9mm service pistols to maintain their snag-free Smith & Wesson snub-nosed backups in the same caliber.

During the final act, Doug takes a Glock 17 from a hospital security officer, identifying himself as a federal agent. Introduced in 1982, the model 17 was Glock’s debut pistol—a full-size semi-automatic in 9x19mm Parabellum. Its nomenclature is said to be either a reference to its standard 17-round magazines or that it was the company’s seventeenth patent. By the following decade, the Glock 17 had become an increasingly popular service pistol for military and police agencies around the world, with an ever-growing range of models differing by size and caliber with shared modularity.

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How to Get the Look

Déjà Vu relies on shifting sense of time, but Denzel Washington’s wardrobe as ATF agent Doug Carlin is very rooted in early 2000s casual: an unstructured suede jacket over sport shirts—all comfortably oversized.

• Olive-brown suede unstructured single-breasted 3-button sport jacket with notch lapels, patch breast pocket, patch hip pockets, 2-button cuffs, and ventless back
• Pale-blue mottled camp shirt with loop collar, plain button-up front, breast pocket, elbow-length short sleeves, and straight hem with side vents
• Black cotton crew-neck short-sleeved T-shirt
• Brown moleskin flat-front trousers with belt loops, side pockets, jetted back pockets, and plain-hemmed bottoms
• Black leather belt with silver square single-prong buckle
• Black smooth leather plain-toe 5-eyelet derby shoes
• Black socks
• Blue striped cotton boxer shorts
• Gold filigreed USMC service ring
• Stainless steel Fortis Classic Cosmonauts Chronograph ref. 630.22.141 wristwatch with 38mm case, fixed tachymeter, round black dial with 3 sub-registers and day-date windows, and steel three-piece link bracelet

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Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

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The Quote

You can be wrong a million times, you only gotta be right once.