Focus on The Night Watch and analyze the Cultural legacy.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to this work in his 1961 essay "Eye and Mind". He writes that "[t]he spatiality of the captain lies at the meeting of two lines of sight that are incompossible with one another. Everyone with eyes has at some time or other witnessed this play of shadows, or something like it, and has been made by it to see a space and the things included therein."
The work has inspired musical works in both the classical and rock traditions, including the second movement of Gustav Mahler's 7th Symphony and Ayreon's "The Shooting Company of Captain Frans B. Cocq" from Universal Migrator Part 1: The Dream Sequencer. In King Crimson's song "The Night Watch", from the band's 1974 album Starless and Bible Black, lyricist Richard Palmer-James muses on the painting to capture a key period in Dutch history, when, after a long period of "Spanish Wars", the merchants and other members of the bourgeoisie can turn their lives inward and focus on the tangible results of their lives’ efforts.  The song adopts a number of perspectives, including the primary subjects, the artist himself, and a modern viewer of the painting, and paints a portrait of the emergence of the modern upper-middle class and the consumerist culture.
Alexander Korda's 1936 biographical film Rembrandt depicts the painting, shown in error in its truncated form, as a failure at its completion, perceived as lampooning its outraged subjects.
In Jean-Luc Godard's 1982 film Passion, The Night Watch is reenacted with live actors in an opening shot. Godard explicitly compares his film to Rembrandt's painting, describing them both as "full of holes and badly-filled spaces". He instructs the viewer not to focus on the overall composition, but to approach his film as one would a Rembrandt and "focus on the faces".
The Night Watch is a major plot device in the eponymous 1995 film, Night Watch, which focuses on the painting's theft.
The Night Watch is parodied on the British cover of  Terry Pratchett's 2002 book by the same name.  The cover illustrator, Paul Kidby, pays tribute to his predecessor Josh Kirby by placing him in the picture, in the position where Rembrandt is said to have painted himself. A copy of the original painting appears on the back cover of the book.
The Night Watch is the subject of a 2007 film by director Peter Greenaway called Nightwatching, in which the film posits a conspiracy within the musketeer regiment of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, and suggests that Rembrandt may have immortalized a conspiracy theory using subtle allegory in his group portrait of the regiment, subverting what was to have been a highly prestigious commission for both painter and subject. His 2008 film Rembrandt's J'Accuse is a sequel or follow-on, and covers the same idea, using extremely detailed analysis of the compositional elements in the painting; in this Greenaway describes The Night Watch as (currently) the fourth most famous painting in the Western world, after the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
In 2006. The Night Watch inspired the literary work A Ronda da Noite by the famous Portuguese writer Agustina Bessa Luís.
On The Amazing Race 21, a task in Amsterdam had teams re-create The Night Watch using live actors.
The painting appears in episode 3 of season 2 of Netflix's Sense8.
The painting appeared in episode 5 of the acclaimed 2016 South Korean television series Goblin as an art collection of the character Goblin / Kim Shin (Gong Yoo).
The painting appeared in the 2022 videogame Horizon Forbidden West by Guerrilla Games in the art vault of Tilda van der Meer.
Sistine Chapel Horizon Forbidden West Willem van Ruytenburch Night Watch Peter Greenaway season 2 Starless and Bible Black Amsterdam The Last Supper eponymous group portrait Ayreon Terry Pratchett Josh Kirby Richard Palmer-James Nightwatching  Terry Pratchett's Goblin Paul Kidby Sense8 The Amazing Race 21 Jean-Luc Godard Dutch Gong Yoo South Korean television series 7th Symphony Rembrandt Maurice Merleau-Ponty Agustina Bessa Luís book Gustav Mahler Universal Migrator Part 1: The Dream Sequencer King Crimson Mona Lisa Alexander Korda Guerrilla Games Rembrandt's J'Accuse