The news that Greta Gerwig will star opposite Ben Stiller in Noah Baumbach’s upcoming Focus Features-financed Greenberg would seem to represent just the latest landmark in an evolution.

As polemicists rush to reject mumblecore as an ill-defined concept and Joe Swanberg as an auteur, Noah Baumbach is borrowing both the Nights and Weekends director as a cameraman and Swanberg’s frequent ingenue as a star. Even Steven Soderbergh is adopting the production methods with which Swanberg has become associated –– shooting fast and cheap on digital, using acquaintances of the production in lieu of actors and asking them to improvise based on an outline, etc. Swanberg invented none of it, but neither did Soderbergh, and when you consider Bubble as a kind of experiment in exotica, the latter has never gone as far in a quest for contemporary naturalism as he does in The Girlfriend Experience. There’s something, at the very least, undeniably interesting about the fact that both filmmakers will release films in 2009 made roughly the same way.

As a result, the m-word might cease to exist as a stand-alone concept –– and I think no one would be happier about that than some of the filmmakers who bristle at being lumped into a movement just because they made a movie about 25 year-olds shot on video –– but its stars and spirit are being assimilated into mainstream indie film. Are boundaries finally breakind down between Indiewood and, uh, DIYwood? Was this inevitable, or are we surprised?