First mention: "Avatar" and reductionist story theory

When someone says "Avatar is just Pocahontas" they mean the movie's just a re-telling of the story of the relationship between Pocahontas and John Smith. This is meant as a put-down. As if to say, "Well, this 3-D multi-million-dollar pic ain't really new after all, because the story is old."
As if every story hasn't been told before. But that's reductionist.
It's good to talk about reductionism because you don't want to be accused of doing it unintentionally. (It's a classic criticism of undergraduate theorising.) And, it's good to talk about reductionism because it's funny.
This reminds me of John Gardner.
John Gardner was the most famous professor at SUNY-Binghamton when Mary and I were there in the late 70's and early 80's. No, I never laid eyes on him, although you'd think a white-haired, over-weight motorcycle-riding professor would have stuck out. He died in a motorcycle crash in 1982. He's most famous for writing "Grendel", the story of Beowulf from the monster's POV, but in academic circles, I think he's well-known because he wrote two books that are often assigned reading in undergraduate writing classes: "The Art of Fiction" and "On Becoming a Novelist." I know I liked "Grendel" so much that I wrote a treatment for a screenplay based on it.
Anyway, John Gardner said (I'm paraphrasing here) "there are only two stories: "you go on a journey" and "a stranger comes to town."
And, to belabor the obvious, this is a joke, because, if you're being reductionist, then there's really only one story, because the difference between Gardner's two stories is just POV. The other reference is to Homer because there's the Iliad ("a stranger - the Greeks - comes to town") and the Odyssey (the biggest, bestest journey of all).
Laugh all you want, but there are people today who use the comedy of reductionism to make millions of dollars for themselves, and these are people who pitch movies to studio executives. You know: "It's a romantic gangster movie, like "Goodfellas" meets "Pretty Woman."