What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre.
The books opens with an examination of the semiotics of professional (fake) wrestling in which Barthes argues that it is spectacle and not sport. As spectacle, it is a human drama being played out for the purpose of engendering the satisfaction of moral justice being delivered without ambiguity and within the constructed frame of unreality no different than a play performed on stage.
As for foam, it is well known that it signifies luxury.
This is not really well-known, of course. Or, at least, it is not a consciously known fact. By the time Barthes finishes describing how the simple scientific construction of water and air meets his assertion as a symbol of luxury, however, most readers will realize that they have known this to be fact somewhere in the depths below conscious thought. The genius of the volume is the way Barthes forces that hidden knowledge upward to achieve conscious recognition.
The bourgeois status of toys can be recognized not only in their forms, which are all functional, but also in their substances.
Essential to understanding semiotics and being to interpret the hidden signs and meanings is that there is always a political dimension to them. This political dimension generally adheres to whatever the prevailing ideology may be. So, then, the meaning of the exact same item or image may—and likely is—utterly different in a capitalist economy than a socialist economy.
myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflection.
The key to understanding the value of myth lies in the understanding that it is not synonymous with fiction. Like a legend, there must be some valid and essential truth at the core. Just as the meaning of a word can be shaded in the way it is spoken by two different people though it be the exact same word, is the meaning of myth a determination of meaning that truth/lie duality. Myth has the power to both true and false simultaneously.
“myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear”
This is one of the underlying foundations of the concept of myth that Barthes strives to make clear. The purpose of myth is not to deny history or obliterate, but just the opposite. Myth can make the core of truth about something eternal and capable of withstanding the vagaries of time through the power of distort. While the original truth may get lost over time, the distortion always contains some small relevant reflection which can be appropriated for contemporary needs.
