Avatar a film directed by James Cameron

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Two hugely popular “mashups”—homemade videos that humorously juxtapose material from different sources—that are currently making the rounds on the Internet seek to ridicule James Cameron’s visually ravishing and ideologically awkward new blockbuster, Avatar. In one, the portentous voice-over from the trailer for Disney’s Oscar-winning animated feature Pocahontas (1995) has been seamlessly laid over footage from Avatar, in which, as in Pocahontas, a confrontation between dark-skinned native peoples and white-skinned invaders intent on commercial exploitation is leavened by an intercultural love story. “But though their worlds were very different…their destinies were one,” the plummy voice of the narrator intones, interrupted by the sound of a Powhatan saying, “These pale visitors are strange to us!”

The other mashup reverses the joke. Here, dialogue from Avatar—a futuristic fantasy in which a crippled ex-Marine is given a second chance at life on a strange new world called Pandora, and there falls in love with a native girl, a complication that confuses his allegiances—has been just as seamlessly laid over bits of Pocahontas. In one, we see an animated image of Captain John Smith’s ship after it makes its fateful landing at Jamestown, while we hear the voice of a character in Avatar—a tough Marine colonel as he welcomes some new recruits to Pandora—sardonically quoting a bit of movie dialogue that has become an iconic expression of all kinds of cultural displacement. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he bellows, “you are not in Kansas anymore!”

The satirical bite of the mashups is directed at what has been seen as the highly derivative, if not outright plagiaristic, nature of Avatar ‘s plot, characters, themes; themes that do, in many ways, seem like sci-fi updatings of the ones you find in Pocahontas. In the film, the Marine, Jake Sully—a paraplegic wounded in a war in Venezuela—begins as the confused servant of two masters. On the one hand, he is ostensibly assisting in a high-tech experiment in which human subjects, laid out in sarcophagus-like pods loaded with wires that monitor their brain waves, remotely operate laboratory-grown “avatars” of the indigenous anthropoids, nine-foot-tall, cyan-colored, nature-loving forest-dwellers called Na’vi. All this technology is meant to help the well-intentioned scientists to integrate and, ultimately, negotiate with the Na’vi in order to achieve a diplomatic solution to a pesky colonial problem: their local habitation, which takes the form of an enormous tree-hive, happens to sit on top of a rich deposit of a valuable mineral that the humans have come to Pandora to mine.

The problem is that Jake’s other master—for whom he is, at first, secretly working, infiltrating the Na’vi with an eye to gathering strategic reconnaissance—is the mercenary army of Marines employed by the mysterious “Company” that’s mining the precious mineral. (Anonymous, exploitive corporations are…