5 ideas
A complete sign, meaning a signifier joined to its signified, is taken over whole and used as a mere signifier in a second system that attaches a new concept to it. The original meaning is emptied but not destroyed, so it gives the myth an alibi. When challenged, the myth can always fall back on the literal level and say it is 'just a picture of a soldier' or 'just a steak.'
Myth's core function is to strip things of the contingent, human, political history that produced them, then present the result as self-evident and eternal. It does not hide things. It purifies them into innocence, so a social arrangement reads as simply 'how things are.' Myth is therefore depoliticized speech, and in Barthes's analysis it chiefly serves bourgeois ideology, which works best by denying that it is an ideology at all.
Barthes describes a Paris Match cover at a barber's shop showing a young Black soldier in French uniform saluting, eyes raised, presumably to the tricolour. The literal image becomes a signifier for the concept that France is a great empire, that all her sons serve her flag without colour discrimination, and that this answers critics of colonialism. The soldier's actual history is drained away and he becomes a mute gesture of imperial legitimacy.
Barthes argues that 1950s French professional wrestling is not a sport but a spectacle akin to ancient theatre. Its audience does not care whether the fight is rigged. Each wrestler's body and gestures signify a moral type, such as the vile 'bastard,' with total legibility, and the crowd demands the visible staging of suffering, defeat, and justice paid in full. Unlike boxing, which is about who wins, wrestling offers meaning made instantly and completely readable.
Myth immunizes an institution by openly confessing a small, contained flaw, such as military brutality or Church rigidity, so that the larger structure is shielded from fundamental critique. Admitting the minor evil makes the system look honest and self-correcting, and it forecloses deeper questioning. Barthes names this as one of several recurring rhetorical figures of bourgeois myth, alongside tautology and 'neither-norism.'