Who's in Control?

Reviews the film Control Room (2004), directed by Jehane Joujaim. The film is a documentary that covers how the U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) Media Center in Doha, Qatar, and the Arabic-language satellite news channel Al Jazeera headquartered in Doha covered the U.S.-led military invasion of Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom. The film covers the period from early March 2003, shortly before the attempted killing of Saddam Hussein through a missile attack, until the fall of Baghdad. Competing truths reside within, between, and among communicators, the people they cover, and audiences alike–very much analogous to Michel Foucault's analysis of Velazquez's painting Las Meninas in The Order of Things (Foucault, 1970)–because all communicators, people about whom communication occurs, film makers, and viewers outside the film are simultaneously the communicator, communicated, and audience. Of special note is that truths become selves and selves become truths through jagged confrontations of normative and naturalizing epistemologies (Quine, 1985) as the film and narratives constructed by viewers and the viewed roll on. The most significant rationale for viewing the film transcends geography, language, ethnicity, and the business world. Because although it may be true that as the Al Jazeera senior producer says, “you can't wage a war without news, without media, without propaganda,” it also may be true that life is a war fought with technologies of power such as psychology and film. Life is but an enmeshment in competing truths. So, viewing this film takes us way beyond discourse on who and what is right and wrong and true and false about Iraq. Instead, the competing truths in Control Room are our competing truths with control and with controlling our own rooms and what lies inside and out. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)