It's shaping up to be a big year for Helvetica. The world's most widely used sans-serif font turns 50 in 2007, and to celebrate, the Museum of Modern Art has launched a year-long tribute to the ubiquitous typeface, which was the first acquired by the Museum for its permanent collection.

Meanwhile, back in March at the SXSW FIlm Festival, I managed to squeeze into a packed screening of a documentary titled simply Helvetica. The directorial debut of Gary Hustwit (he previously produced the Wilco film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart), the film is essentially an academic treatise on the cultural proliferation of the world's most pervasive font. The idea of watching 8-10 international design masters debate the socioeconomic symbolism of a typeface might sound like torture. It's not, thanks in part to Helvetica's uber-cool post-rock soundtrack (featuring contributions from The Album Leaf, Sam Prekop, and current Pitchfork darlings Battles). As a design layperson, I had a little trouble telling the various European typography rock stars apart, but for graphic design geeks (like my boyfriend, who sat next to me at the screening in rapt attention), Helvetica plays like extremely tasteful porn.

This past weekend, Slate.com devoted two full features to Helvetica-mania. While Mia Fineman's essay/slideshow comes off as a cheap ploy to rack up page views whilst promoting Hustwit's film, in the other feature famous writers revealed the font in which they most like to write. Their answers ranged from anecdotal (Palatino makes Caleb Crain think of Marlboros, which in turn makes him want to smoke) to semi-delusional (typing in Courier allows Jonathan Lethem to fantasize that he's banging away not at a PC, but at "an eternal Selectric of the mind"). Courier received four additional votes. Helvetica got zero love--in fact, Anne Fadiman even prefaced her endorsement of Times Roman by announcing that her "favorite fonts are unrepentantly anti-Helvetican."

All of this hoopla seems to center on a single question: why Helvetica--or why not? What makes this font different from all other fonts, and why does it arouse so much passion in both lovers and haters? In Hustwit's film, the same qualities named as virtues by Helvetica's supporters--its simplicity, utilitarianism and modernism--are cited as fatal flaws by the font's detractors. In the world defined by the documentary, how you feel about Helvetica determines what kind of person you are. Helvetica is a European invention that has attained a sheen of Americana through its omnipresence in our popular culture--like french fries, or even cinema. As with those staples of modern life, when it comes to Helvetica one man's elegance is another man's banality.