What are the main points in Barthes' Mythologies?

One of the most basic points made by Roland Barthes,
strongly implied in the series of short essays in the first section of
Mythologies, is that anything produced in our culture -- including
soap detergent advertisements or popular (now widely called "professional") wrestling --
is worthy of our attention and analysis because these cultural productions can have a
complex and important meaning or function in our culture. This point is profound, I
think, and has earned Barthes recognition as one of the earliest practitioners of
cultural criticism.

In his long essay in the second section
of Mythologies, titled “Myth Today,” Barthes also makes a number of explicit, sometimes
challenging points. One of his main points is that the linguistic sign system of
Ferdinand de Saussure can be extended to include another layer of meaning. According to
Saussure, a linguistic sign is made up of the signifier (the word that we say) and the
signified (the thing that we mean when we say the
word):

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signifier

  
---                =       
sign

signified

Barthes
says that the sign itself (including the original signifier and signified) acts as the
signifier on a second level of meaning, the mythic level. On this mythic level, the
original sign acts as the signifier and is paired with a new (and more abstract)
signified. This second pairing, Barthes argues, is not arbitrary. It serves clear
ideological purposes, such as supporting the values of the ruling class. (At the time
that Barthes wrote Mythologies, he was strongly influenced by
Marxism. At a later stage in his career, he moved away from Marxism toward
post-structuralism, which makes his later works – in my opinion – fascinating but even
more challenging to read.)

A second explicit point that
Barthes makes in the essay “Myth Today” involves what he calls “inoculation.” Barthes
argues that a little exposure to criticism (such as the handwringing that we see on TV
when people talk about how the cost of college is increasing at something like three
times the rate of inflation) can essentially blind us to the larger, related injustices
of the systems in which we live (such as the enormous disparity between the haves and
have-nots in the United States).