Point of Order ($29.95 DVD) / In the Year of the Pig ($24.95 DVD) If Good Night, And Good Luck. has done nothing else, it's focused some welcome attention on Emile de Antonio's 1964 documentary. De Antonio (or "De," as he was known) boiled the 200 televised hours of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings down to a 97-minute documentary that plays like the C-SPAN equivalent of a political thriller. An uncompromising leftist whose polemical, montage-driven style clearly influenced Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (although he despised "fascist voice of God narration"), de Antonio saw the hearings first and foremost as political theater: He begins the movie by introducing "the cast," among them McCarthy, his counsel and hatchet-man Roy Cohn, army lawyer Joseph Welch and Democratic Sen. Stuart Symington, with an uncredited cameo by Robert Kennedy. Point of Order doesn't gloss over the hearings' ostensible subject, McCarthy and Cohn's efforts to procure a draft deferment and other special treatment for Army Private G. David Schine (who, in addition to having conducted anti-Red investigations for McCarthy and Cohn, was rumored to be Cohn's lover), but it recognizes that their true purpose was as hanging party for McCarthy, whose once-profitable persecution of alleged Communists had begun to hurt his own party. The "perversion of power" he's accused of goes way beyond Schine, a fact McCarthy only seems to grasp as the noose begins to tighten.

Early on, McCarthy refers to the hearings' TV audience as "the jury," confident in his popular support. But his bedraggled, bowed and, according to some accounts, frequently drunken appearance undermines his flagging credibility at every turn, lending him an almost pathetic cast. In the commentary to the New Yorker DVD, taken from an interview conducted before de Antonio's death, the director savages critics who gave the movie favorable notices for its alleged vindication of the system. Although McCarthy was indeed discredited—by Welch, who famously asked him, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" and Symington, who gaveled a close to the session and walked away while McCarthy was still talking into an open microphone—the end result is cold comfort; Welch's populist grandstanding and Symington's pompous pronouncements are, in a sense, a vindication of McCarthyism, not a rebuttal to it. Welch, whom de Antonio places on almost "the same moral level" as the man he destroyed, is adept at innuendo and outright smear. He sarcastically asks a McCarthy staffer if a doctored photo "came from a pixie," and when McCarthy tries to underline the absurdity of Welch's phrase by asking him to define the term "pixie," Welch seizes the moment to insinuate Cohn's much-rumored homosexuality: "It is my understanding that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy." As the room breaks up in laughter, McCarthy forces a good-natured chuckle, but the killing stare on Cohn's face is unmistakable.

Of course, none of this makes McCarthy's crimes less odious: He directly ruined thousands of lives and fomented a climate of fear which, among other things, made it unlikely that any real Communist infiltrators would ever be caught. But Point of Order is less a document of the use of sunlight as a disinfectant than a massive pile-on, a warning to those who would overstep their bounds: Accuse all the Hollywood liberals and university professors you want, but don't fuck with the U.S. Army. At the end of Point of Order, the committee room stands empty but still lit, a stage waiting for its next play. The double-edged understanding of the power of television is nowhere to be found in the simplistic Good Night, but it was all over C-SPAN last Friday, as the House of Representatives degenerated into a screaming free-for-all. The Republican attempt to debate a sham "Hunter resolution" rather than U.S. Rep. John Murtha's proposal to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq represents an appallingly perfect understanding of the politics of television. If the Army-McCarthy hearings sealed the fate of one untelegenic demagogue, they also proved that in the glare of the lights, truth is less impossible than irrelevant.

Also new to DVD is de Antonio's In the Year of the Pig, his scathing indictment of U.S. involvement in Vietnam (released, unlike Peter Davis' Oscar-winning Hearts and Minds, when the country was still committed to the war). De Antonio's sly, polemical wit is in full swing here: One commentator calls Ho Chi Minh "the George Washington of Vietnam," while "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" played on Vietnamese instruments mocks the insufficiency of cross-cultural metaphors. Home Vision's disc includes an hour of posthumous audio commentary as well as a half-hour televised interview in which De socks it to his critics once again.

(sam@citypaper.net)