"The Avengers, which last week enjoyed the biggest North American opening in history, recasts 9/11 in the Bush years' dominant movie mode, namely the comic book superhero spectacular – albeit with a heavy dose of irony and added stereoscopic depth. But more fundamentally, The Avengers demonstrates how completely 9/11 has been superseded by another catastrophe, namely the financial meltdown of September 2008. To the extent that the movie has any sort of social content (or any content), it offers a flattering view of America's best as a group of eccentric individualists bamboozled into saving the world (economy) by the unflappable Samuel L Jackson's black dude of mystery. But even this Obama-iste reading is a bit of a stretch. The medium is the message. Hollywood felt threatened by 9/11 in 2001 but impervious to financial disaster in 2008. Three days after Lehman Brothers went bust, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg assured investors that movies were "recession-proof". Of course, the industry did not allow for the simultaneous erosion of the DVD market and the public's discretionary income. The Avengers has less to do with the terror of falling buildings than falling grosses. The palliative for that goes by the name 3D. Bombs away: The Avengers is 9/11 as you've never seen it!"