Foe Furren

I've just chanced to see the opening credits of the film Enemy of the state. They employ a variation on the "faux Cyrillic" (or more generally, "faux foreign") theme ... but, unlike Ray Girvan's examples or mine, I'm not sure what the point is.

The letter "E" is replaced by "Σ" (Greek capital sigma), "A" by " Λ" (Greek capital lambda). So, for instance, the credit for Gene Hackman is rendered:

I've seen the E/Σ substitution before, as a ham fisted over-egging (excuse the accidental food theme...) of faux Cyrillic, but here it becomes faux Greek. Which might make sense if there was any Greek connection in the film ... but there isn't ... Enemy of the state is set in the US, with Will Smith's African American lawyer pitted primarily against a US intelligence agency and secondarily against Italian American mobsters.

To further confuse matters, "Y" is replaced with something that resembles the currency symbol for the Japanese yen ( ¥). What's that all about?

Most odd...

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Update: in a comment to this post, Ray has identified the font as Metrolox, which is available as a TTF font download (thanks for that, Ray). What its pseudo Greek references have to do with anything in the film is still a mystery.

However, there turns out to be another twist to this story. Having downloaded the font to look at, I opened the author's documentation file, the open sentences of which are:

“Metrolox is loosely based on the titling of the Enemy of the State movie. I say "loosely" because the movie titling showed only so many letters, and the lab's final version turned out so big.”

So Metrolox was born of Enemy of the state, rather than the other way around, which is interesting.

Apart from the specifics of relevance in the case of this film and font, I also wonder about the reasoning behind uses to which typography is put.

The role of "fancy" fonts is, generally, to capture attention; they are suited to signage, labels, short headlines (the examples Ray offered are perfect). They are not well suited to conveying textual information, since the very quality which makes them effective eye catchers (the fact that reading is momentarily interrupted, the eye tripping up, so to speak, over unexpected elements) becomes a barrier to extended reading.

It could be argued, perhaps, that the names of actors in a film, superimposed one at a time over its opening scenes, are not continuous textual information but a form of bulleted headline. I also concede that I probably paid more attention to the names depicted than I might otherwise have done ... so perhaps that's the point.

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Yet another update: in a second comment to this post, Ray has made a good suggestion about the rationale for the use of the font, which I find convincing:

“Could the allusion be to the villains of the film being in the NSA: in the field of cryptography, security and surveillance of foreign communications? That could explain the mixed foriegn characters; and the "O" looks very like the keyhole of a 180 degree toolbox cylinder key.”