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.

On the eve of a major exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, artist and professor Steve Kurtz rolled over in bed to find his wife lying next to him--dead. He called 911, and the authorities who arrived immediately began asking questions about the bacterial samples and biological equipment in his home. Finding an invitation to an art exhibit containing Arabic letters was apparently the last straw. The FBI took Kurtz away in handcuffs, sealed off his home, and detained him as a suspected bio-terrorist. He would spend the next 22 hours in custody.

Meanwhile, agents in HAZMAT suits stormed in to confiscate his computers, books, and research. The technicians sequestered his cat in the attic for several days without food or water. The agency also confiscated Hope Kurtz's corpse, which they autopsied twice before conceding that the suspect had not contributed in any way to his wife's death. The FBI continued to investigate Kurtz' work and life, and over a year later, he was indicted on federal charges of mail and wire fraud, in connection with the bacteria he had purchased for his Mass MOCA exhibit. He and his longtime collaborator, research scientist Dr. Robert Farrell, are still awaiting trial. They each face up to 20 years in prison.

"I heard about [the story] and dropped everything," says filmmaker Lynn Hershman-Leeson, whose Strange Culture is screening as part of the New Frontier sidebar here at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. The experimental documentary places Kurtz's story within the larger context of post-9/11 paranoia, with its potentially devastating impact on civil rights. Hershman-Leeson, a Sundance veteran, is quite comfortable situating her latest film as a work of activism. "I felt this was the most important thing I could do," she says. "It was just critical to our society."