Watery gravy

I think we’re starting to see it. When I look at my ranking of 2005’s movie releases, a whole bunch of the top movies are directed by Xers, star Xers, and breathe Xer attitudes: Joss Whedon’s Serenity, George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck (which may well be the first classic of the new Golden Age; I just came from a press event with Clooney about the film, and I’ll be talking about him and the film more soon), Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, Liev Shreiber’s Everything Is Illuminated, Doug Liman’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith (which, wait, may be the first classic of the new Golden Age), Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know... Xers are just beginning to move into the positions of power that will allow us to have genuine control over how we express ourselves -- when there’s an Xer studio head or network chief, that’s when you’ll see an explosion of particularly Xer art.

And so I’ve been having all these really positive Xers-making-art experiences this week. I saw Serenity and was simply blown away by Whedon’s defiance of Hollywood convention. I met Clooney and heard him talk about his film. I met Neil Gaiman -- who’s not an Xer, but he’s only just on the other side of the cusp -- and listened to him talk about things geeky and arty (and I’ll blog more about that and his new film Mirrormask soon, too). And part of the problem with the whole "where is the Xer perspective?" thing ties into something Gaiman said to me, about how so many of the comic-book artists he reads these days have no cultural perspective: they read other comic books, but they don’t read Poe or Shakespeare, they don’t look at Renaissance art, they don’t watch old movies -- they’re just regurgitating other comic artists; they’re not saying anything new. And that connected to something else someone said, about how the Sci-Fi Channel series Tripping the Rift will never establish itself as a geek touchstone because it’s all about referencing other geeky things -- it has no perspective of its own.

And I realized, that’s what we’ve been waiting for: art that snaps the Xer personality into focus (a couple of isolated instances have hinted at it: The Matrix, Fight Club, both in 1999; we may later recognize that year as an early indication of what was to come). It’s starting to happen.

On TV, we have Lost, from Xer creator J.J. Abrams. And now we have the imitators, like Surface, on NBC, and Invasion, on ABC, both of which premiered this week. Neither features dramatic plane crashes on remote tropical islands, but each is very clearly a reaction to the eerie mystery of Lost, so much so that they have far more in common with each other than they do with the series on whose coattails they’re trying to ride. The creators of both Surface and Invasion seem to have reverse engineered the unique spin Lost put on, say, the kind of edgy paranoia that is, in its most basic form, nothing new to speculative fantasy, to come full circle back around to the cheap clichés and obvious characters that Lost wants nothing to do with. Both Surface and Invasion want to creep us out with ooky stuff happening in the ocean -- on Surface, it looks like they’re aiming for some ancient sealife coming to land (I’m thinking about Doctor Who’s Silurians, for some reason); on Invasion, it’s looking like aliens dredged up by a hurricane. One show has the Little Girl with a strange attunement to the phenomenon; it doesn’t matter which show. One show has the wacky fat guy who rants about government conspiracies; the other show has the nerdy teenager who’s into weird pseudoscience stuff -- again, it doesn’t matter which show is which.

I may stick with Invasion for a bit, because I’ve always had a little thing for William Fichtner, who plays the small-town Florida sheriff, and because the show seems to have a bit of sense of humor about itself. Surface, though, is so deadly solemn that it makes me want to slit my wrists. The real problem with both shows -- inasmuch as the first episode of each show demonstrates -- is that they have nothing original to say. They’re just regurgitating stuff that other, more clever people have already said. And Neil Gaiman would hate that. I do too.