The age of electronic media has broken down linear, sequential space and, therefore, made linear, sequential thought obsolete. We live in an age of integral consciousness and to live integrally means to live mythically.
That is a rough summation of McLuhan-ism. We need not take it literally to see the value in the statement, value in terms of politics, culture and ideology. To explain:
Politics
The predicament of the bourgeois liberal outlook was summed up quite neatly by the philosopher, one F Mercury:
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality.
Which is not bad, I think. The reality we directly experience is alienated and atomised, a thin sliver of the general context. Yet we cannot understand even that smaller section of reality without access to the greater context. Any attempt to build up a picture of reality piece by piece might seem oh-so objective, but is of course doomed, by the restless changes in social context if by nothing else.
We have to think in terms of archetypes, in terms of abstractions. One of Marx’s most crucial insights was establishing through his critique of political economy the existence of objective points of view within capitalism. There are the bourgeois and proletarian points of view, and there are bourgeois and proletarians with points of view. One is measured against the other, the critical renovation of consciousness described by Gramsci.
Without this abstraction, this ‘myth’, we would lose our link with the greater context; reality becomes a landslide, something which happens to us.
Art ‘n’ stuff
One of the difficulties with direct realism in art is it's partial and one-sided, or else it’s unreal. The non-ideological work is merely the most ideological. Its assumptions are taken as self-evident. Fantasy, magic-realism, elastic reality (as it’s called in The Simpsons) are much more truthful, realistic methods.
Recent interest: the fascination with vampires. Vampires are strongly associated with aristocracy. They are also associated with sexuality. This has become much more pronounced in recent pop culture. Vampires are now pretty much benign. Take Edward Cullen from the Twilight series, or Bill Compton from True Blood: they are a strange combination of potency and rigid self-denial. Pop culture is trying to work out conflicted notions of sexuality through vampirism.
True Blood is an example of elastic reality at work. It is a magical melodrama. As well as vampires it has fairies, shape-shifters, maenads and such like, existing as if normal in the modern United States. This flexible reality is also a means of talking about civil rights, particularly LGBT and ethnic minority movements. It gets to the core of such subjects, I think, much more quickly and easily through fantasy than direct realism.