The Avengers and Mr. Faust...

So, as with virtually everything in the age of mass consumer society and its commodity aestheticism, The Avengers/Avengers Assemble film seems to have had its fifteen minutes of fame in the "public arena", the "public arena" driven and whipped up to orgasmic excitement by corporate media advertising and its accompanying mass spectacles. I haven't seen the film and have no interest in seeing it. Perhaps I will buy the DVD when it shows up in the bargain bins at Big Lots. The interesting question about it, however, is, as one poster I read put it, has Joss Whedon, the man who brought us the ugliness of American suburbia in "Buffy", the man who critiqued the military-university-industrial complex in "Buffy" and "The I in Team", the man who made us empathise with a group of outsiders of various creeds and colours from an antiseptic corporate world of the future that controlled almost everything in "Firefly", the man who showed us the corporate attempt to create, manipulate, and control identities in "Dollhouse", has had his own Mephistophelean moment recently, just like the fang gang had at the end of "Angel" season four, and has made his own Faustian bargain, just as the fang gang also did, with his own Wolfram and Hart? Well perhaps Whedon's low budget lowfi adaptation of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing" will dispel this feeling of foreboding that Whedon may have sold his soul to the devil of juvenile wham bam thank you ma'am Hollywood, if only for the moment.