Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

My experience with Pleasure Dome was one where I was alternatively fascinated and staving off boredom. When there was a way that I felt I could engage with the film, I found it's vividness breathtaking. However, when I felt like an outsider to the impregnable strangeness of the film, the color and emotion and lyrical quality could not translate into something other than tedium for me. I think this is largely due to how I specifically engage with film, really any film. I need to be able to connect to the pathos of a character, to the underlying emotion of a situation or circumstance or environment, something to hold on to as a uniquely human experience. What I ended up taking away from Pleasure Dome was the lurid quality of the ritual, the act of transformation through a heightened religious experience and how the indulgences of the characters were met with ominous warnings. Even the act of transcendence felt like an indulgent act, and while it could be seen as a positive for one to allow some release through indulgence, through wine, through drugs, some mad carnival relief of repression and anxiety and grief... At the same time it could also be the act of thrashing around near the threshold of insanity. Along the same line of indulgence, the film seemed interested in the idea of human beings as an image, an outward perception we try to maintain for others, some allusion to our vanity. The film seemed to subvert this idea in a couple important ways, the swallowing of jewelry (the inward consumption of outward "beauty"), the birdcage over the woman's face, the fox fur being stomped out by another woman's heels. Perhaps this idea of subversive ideals of beauty is somehow connected to the men in drag, I couldn't say. Lastly, I wanted to make note that I don't think the endless repetitions at the end of the film had the desired impact on me. I almost felt like they were too static. I couldn't feel the experience evolve and change and so I wondered what the prolonged nature of the ritual really did for it.