Mythology as a product of the culture industry
The products of the culture industry disseminated by the mass media of communication are often inspired by mythological creations, drawing on devices that are as accomplished as they are explicit.
In Umberto Eco’s already memorable essay on the “Superman myth,” the symbolic significance of the character is made clear. Equally noteworthy is the structure of the narrative “frozen in time” that characterizes the discourse of comics and that emulates the mythic time to which Mircea Eliade refers.
Myths thus appear with an explicit presence in the media, perhaps because they strike at a target of ancestral interests with which we humans continue to identify. It is therefore no coincidence that literary-cinematic sagas have achieved commercial success; although conceived by individual authors and not, strictly speaking, popular creations, they are evidently inspired by themes and characters from Celtic, Greco-Roman, and Christian mythologies, as is clearly the case with “The Lord of the Rings”, “Harry Potter”, or, more recently, “The Chronicles of Narnia”.