HELVETICA
Directed by Gary Hustwit. Feb 8, 10-11. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel)
4 1/2 Stars

Meet Erik Spiekermann. He’s a forbidding individual: tall, thin, stern-looking, with a clipped German accent. If he were your schoolmaster, you wouldn’t dream of talking during class. But he’s not a schoolmaster; he’s a typographer—a font designer—and it’s not disobedient students who are the objects of his wrath. No, it’s Helvetica, the world’s most popular font, the font of choice for everything from American Apparel to Panasonic to the iPhone to the U.S. space shuttle to the New York subway system. Helvetica is everywhere, but its ubiquity doesn’t impress Spiekermann. To him, that’s like arguing that because there’s a McDonalds on every streetcorner, it’s the world’s greatest restaurant.

“You can’t read it!” he harrumphs. “Every letter looks the same—that’s the problem with the Swiss. They want everything to look the same. That’s not a font—that’s an army, without everyone wearing the same fucking helmet.”

Asked why, if it’s such a terrible font, it’s so popular, Spiekermann can only offer a weary sigh. “I don’t know,” he says at last. “Why is bad taste ubiquitous?”

Most of the designers director Gary Hustwit talks to in his wonderful documentary Helvetica take a more appreciative view of the font, developed a mere 50 years ago at the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland. (It was initially called Neue Haas Grotesk, but they changed it to the much snappier “Helvetica” when they decided to market it in North America.) Michael Bierut has a hilarious speech in which he talks about the cluttered, old-fashioned design of magazine ads and corporate logos in the 1950s, and then compares the advent of Helvetica to crawling through the desert with your mouth caked with crud and suddenly being offered a cool, clear glass of refreshing water. 

When type designer Mike Parker describes the look of Helvetica—the way the air around each character holds it so that it lives “in a powerful matrix of enclosed space”—the joy on his face is absolutely palpable. There’s a wonderful film critic named Jim Emerson who rightly calls this scene one of the most euphoric film sequences of the year.

And it happens in a film about a font! But this isn’t a documentary like The King of Kong, which finds comedy in the spectacle of watching so many people getting passionate about something as ridiculous as a videogame. The King of Kong never convinces you that Donkey Kong is important in and of itself—but as you listen to Hustwit’s interviewees talk so energetically and articulately about Helvetica and the evolution of graphic design in the second half of the 20th century, you realize the extent to which design, and warring design philosophies, affect our everyday lives. 

You realize the extent to which something as seemingly innocuous as the shapes of letters can affect our understanding of the words they spell. You realize that what might seem at first to be an unusually clean and efficient font can stand for an entire political worldview: designer Paula Scher tells Hustwit how, when she started out as a designer in the ’60s, none of her designer friends would ever use Helvetica. So many corporations had adopted it into their logos, you see, that to their mind, using Helvetica was tantamount to saying you were endorsing the companies that were behind the Vietnam War. (Hustwit asks her, if Helvetica was the font of the Vietnam War, what’s the font of the current war in Iraq? “Helvetica!” she says with a laugh. “Nothing changes!”)

Peppered with witty montages demonstrating the inescapability of Helvetica in cities as far-flung as New York and Amsterdam, and accompanied by Kristian Dunn’s droll, jazzy score—one of the best documentary film scores I’ve heard in a while—Helvetica is a delight, but not merely a delight. Ever since I saw Helvetica a couple of months ago, I’ve been recommending it to people, usually talking it up as kind of a stunt: a movie about a font that somehow manages not to be boring. 

But the more I think about Helvetica, the more profound it seems. The world seems a little more marvelous after you’ve seen it, a little more filled with miracles of human ingenuity and aesthetic inspiration. And it’s nice to have naysayers like Erik Spiekermann in the mix as well—just for spice.