Mental and Social Scotoma Represented and Worked Through in the Television Series Our Boys (Levi, Ceder and Abu-Wael 2019)

Abstract

ABSTRACT The TV series Our Boys (2019), which deals with traumatic historical events, provides the basis for a discussion of blind spots (scotoma) as a metaphor for collective denial. This social blindness is one of the troubling phenomena of the current sociopolitical and cultural period and bears in particular on the erasure in public consciousness of moral infractions and processes of dehumanization. While myths, legends, and stories have always been a means to represent social processes, and a space to reflect on them, today digital media and TV series in particular tell the unifying stories of the age. The article aims to derive further knowledge about how denial and scotoma work in society and explore how a TV series can point towards a remedy. To this end, it focuses on locating and naming the medium’s methods which allow this phenomenon to be represented and worked through. The article shows how from episode to episode, Our Boys’ narrative structure, points of view, mise en scène and editing permit a wider visual range. Expansion of the viewer’s visual field prompts this process of working through, initiating a movement from denial to taking responsibility for establishing a moral sociality.