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These are Vs. (1993), Vitalogy (1994) and No Code (1996), all of which are pretty interesting and have moments of real greatness. If you ask me, Vitalogy is the best of these, not necessarily because it contains more good songs than the others but because in its noisy, cluttered production, in its stylistic ecumenicism, in its emotional ambivalence, it best reflects the band's conflicted relationship with themselves and their own success. Along with Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac, it is one of the last truly strange records made by a huge rock band, one of the last that actively interrogates the bizarre act of using commercial art to communicate with millions of people.

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Of course sincere feeling doesn't disqualify something from being camp. Far from it. The question always is: do you read a given performance on the level of its original (or what you might call "intended") emotional or aesthetic context? Or do you read it ironically, on the basis of the unintended hilarity that those overwrought aesthetics produce, as with camp? With Pearl Jam, the answer for me is somehow both.

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From the fall of 1991 until the end of 1992, Vedder took the concept of the stage dive to its endgame. He would climb on any structure that could be climbed--scaffolding, lighting rigs, whatever--finding the highest point in the venue, putting himself in intentional serious danger, terrifying everybody. (It is not known whether this practice subconsciously influenced my mid-2000's taste for drunkenly climbing trees. This habit once left me hanging upside-down by my knees, pants torn, in a friend's parents' suburban New Jersey home in the middle of winter. Eventually, cooler heads prevailed.) He would then, if at all possible, launch himself from that spot into the crowd. (This whole ritual is immortalized in the video for "Evenflow".) Every subsequent stage dive has seemed to me pale and canned by comparison.

3

Pearl Jam's performance at Atlanta's Fox Theater on April 3, 1994 is considered by many to be the best show they ever played. It wasn't one of my primary examples because a) it takes place after the band's early, so-happy-to-be-playing-music ecstatic freak-out phase and because b) because there's no video of it.

The show took place during one of the band's darker phases. They were overwhelmed by the crush of their outrageous fame, furious at the culture industry's exploitation of their music and its intrusion into their private lives. And that fury is present in every almost every moment of the show. The band is loose and expansive and totally ripping. Vedder is in a frenzy of anger and maybe even grief. It's kind of stunning actually. Check out their rendition of "Blood", off of Vs.:

 
And here's "Porch":

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Note here, the intersection and mutual enfolding of the film's two principle worlds.

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In Rita, Diane has created a helpless creature badly in need of rescuing. And Betty, with her comic benevolence is more than capable of that rescue. It hardly bears mentioning that this picture bears little relation to the sordid waking reality.

This is partly pathetic in that it grotesquely aggrandizes both Camilla/Rita's vulnerability and Diane/Betty's devoted selflessness. But it also reveals that Diane has a deep desire to care for another human being, to be a better person. And this, I think, is maybe the most poignant element of this very sad movie. Diane's attempts at human connection and her great, unreal vision of a better world are answered with cruelty and contempt.

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They do even more than that. Two of the most moving moments in the film--the lip-synced "Crying" performance and Betty's audition--are shown be essentially contrived. In the first, a mechanical reproduction replaces an authentic human voice. In the second, Betty and her leathery potential co-star conjure an incredibly intense performance out of the least compelling setting possible: a drab casting room full of snarky Hollywood hacks. The scene's artificiality is laid bare--it is a meaningless audition, a scene-within-a-scene from a movie that we know will probably never be made.

Lynch has declared many times that the initial stages of the creative process are essentially passive. One simply waits, he says, for an idea to arrive, as if from outside of oneself. This is more like a vision (or a dream) than an expressive welling up of one's inner world. Once it does arrive, what remains is the sometimes tedious, often joyous practicality of recreating and communicating that vision. The artist is first a medium and then a technician. (I must apologize to Lynch here for attempting to re-translate his film back into language. Sorry.)

Nevertheless, successful works of art belie the artificiality of their creation; they induce intense emotions, they enfold us, trance-like, into an authentic, sensible world. And this, I think, is one of Mulholland Drive's important themes: the roots of artistic expression are impersonal and contrived, but this contrivance does not make art any less expressive. It is an illusion; it is magic in the best sense of the word.