KMC Forums - The Fascist font of Star Wars

This is something I feel I should have known for a long time, but which I’ve only just found out. It’s one of those odd little nuggets you come across online: on this occasion at Jeff Atwood’s blog, who forwards comments by Suzy Rice, who designed the original Star Wars logo.

I designed the logo for the film, Star Wars with a minimalist directive from George Lucas: that he wanted “something very fascist” as to the film’s logo. … My work was for and about the main title, “Star Wars” (upon which the rest of the titling later has been constructed and which appears in the main titles of each Episode beginning with that first Episode IV release in 1977).

I’d been reading a book about German type design the night before my first meeting with George Lucas, a book that provided historical information about a few popular typefaces used today, how they developed into what we see and use in the present. And so, when George described what he wanted, I returned to the office and used what I reckoned to be the most “fascist” typeface I could think of as reference: Helvetica (Helvetika) Black. Helvetica is the contemporary family name of the typeface, and “Black” is a secondary font within that font family—a modified,
emboldened weight of the original, as is, similarly, an italicized version of Helvetica, “Helvetica Italic” and several others within the font family of Helvetica.

Helvetica is a relatively contemporary typeface, protected by Trademark owned by Linotype, that was designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger for the Haas Type Foundry in Switzerland. However, there existed an earlier typeface that was designed and put into use by Joseph Goebbels for the German Socialist Party, and it is Goebbels’ type design that is regarded as being the origination of what was later (re)designed by Miedinger and named as Helvetica.

…

[So], the forerunner typeface version, Helvetika, was designed by the dreaded Joseph Goebbels for use in culture-wide signage—road signs, license plates, “official” statements—to implement a standard of appearance by a government for purposes of both organizing and monopolizing culture through a uniform statement (uniformity of expression and style). Repetition with clarity in some circumstances and usage express an absence of difference, lack of variation. So, the modernization and redesign of Helvetica/Helvetika into acceptable use by this talented Swiss designer, Max Miedinger, rendered the earlier permutation of the Goebbels’ typeface—designed and used to enforce socio-political idealism—something quite akin to my eye and sensibilities for to fulfil the request by George Lucas for a “very fascist” logo for his film.

This seems to me interesting, in part because the Star Wars films are so charmingly blind to their own complicity with fascist ideology. What I mean is that Lucas thinks he’s critiquing fascism, or at least dramatising the fight against fascism. The bad-guy Imperials with their Nazi-chic uniforms and their ruthless ways and all that. But of course the real fascists here are the peculiar warrior cult called the Jedi, Lucas’s hero-figures, who wield power in an unaccountable and unelected manner; who are genetic supermen dedicated to the arts of war at the expense of messy human entanglements, like sex (which, of course, they are forbidden). Who, most of all operate in the service of an obscure, exacting and fundamentally mystical system of beliefs; one that privileges a transcendent ‘oneness’ (referred to with the Hitlerian, or at least Nietzschean, moniker ‘the Force) over the diversity and hybridity of actual life. Their devotion to this cause gives them, they believe, the right to override all other moral obligations. These same Jedi in the course of Revenge of the Sith attempt to murder the democratically elected leader and instead enforce rule through their mystical beliefs.

Still. Not to rant.

What I’m really interested in is the question of fonts. Can one have a fascist font? Or does that take the descriptor too far down the hierarchy of things to be meaningful? How far down is far enough? We can, clearly, call regimes fascist; belief-systems fascist; even, if some people are to be believed, major religions fascist. Perhaps it makes sense to call individuals fascist, although here I suspect the label is much more often misapplied than applied correctly. [‘Hey, man, my Dad won’t let me borrow the car tonight. He says I got to, like, tidy my room first. He’s being soooo unreasonable.’ ‘He’s, like, a fascist, man – no disrespect, but, he is.’ ‘Totally, dude.’ (Incidentally, this exchange is copyright Cardboard Gen-X-Cliché Incorporated and cannot be reproduced without permission)]. But does it make sense to call objects fascist? (A jackboot? A small rectangular moustache? A sock?) To call styles of clothing fascist? Can there be a fascist sex-act? A fascist thought? Alright, alright. But a fascist font? Or is that, as the saying goes, un font trop loin? [That should be des fonts trop loin, I think; but that would spoil the gag. And it is a gag. It’s perhaps the most obscure Nazis-therefore-WWII-related gag the Valve has ever hosted. But still.]

Interesting?

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Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.