The five movies that inspired David Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’
David Lynch has made many beautiful movies in his career, from the heartbreaking tale The Elephant Man to the terrifyingly bizarre Blue Velvet. Yet, out of all his movies, Mulholland Drive remains his most addictive. With every watch, you unpeel a new layer, discovering hidden secrets and strange coincidences that are hardly coincidences at all.
The movie, starring Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, sees the pair play dual roles as we enter into a world where reality and dreams become blurred. Several scenes seem to make no sense in relation to the rest of the plot, such as the diner sequence or the Billy Ray Cyrus infidelity scene, yet they all hold strong significance, forming a slightly confusing yet intoxicating plot.
As Rita and Betty try to work out the former’s identity after she suffers from amnesia, we see Betty attempt to make it in Hollywood as an overzealous newcomer. We soon discover just how corrupt the industry is, and as the pair embark on a passionate affair, things come crashing down when the spell is broken and the dream is shattered. Betty is actually the alter ego of Diane, who has been dreaming up the whole thing.
In reality, she’s a bitter and broken failed star whose affair with Camilla (Rita in the dream) has been forced to end. She is chewed up and spat out by Hollywood, eventually shooting herself as she hallucinates miniature versions of her grandparents from earlier in the film. It’s a surreal experience, informed by some of Lynch’s favourite movies, like Sunset Boulevard and Vertigo.
The movies that inspired Mulholland Drive:
Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
One of the most significant themes in Mulholland Drive is doppelgangers and doubles, with Rita and Betty’s identities blurring and becoming unfixed from themselves. In one scene, Rita wears a blonde wig to look like Betty, and we later find out that Rita is actually Camilla and Betty is really Diane.
In Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, a nurse named Alma looks after a mute actor, Elisabet, who is caring for her at a house by the seaside. Yet, their identities also begin to merge, and we start to wonder if the characters are two halves of the same person. As one of the most iconic movies about doubles and identity, its influence on Mulholland Drive is more than evident.
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
Another movie with a doppelganger theme that has inspired much of Lynch’s work, particularly Mulholland Drive, is Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock. The movie follows James Stewart’s Scottie as he investigates an acquaintance’s wife, only for her to jump to her death. Yet, he soon becomes obsessed when he believes he has found her doppelganger, which unravels a cunning murder plot.
The theme of doubles clearly influenced Lynch’s approach in Mulholland Drive, as did the bright use of colours. Moreover, the scene where Betty covers Rita’s mouth when they discover a dead body is a direct reference to the way Scottie holds Kim Novak’s Judy/Madeleine when she witnesses a death.
Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
Lynch has routinely called Sunset Boulevard one of his favourite movies ever, explaining to Dazed that it has “the greatest mood; you’re immersed in it like a dream. It catches a Hollywood story that connects the golden age of Hollywood with the present day.” He also loves the movie’s combination of “beauty,” “sadness,” and “mystery,” which are all words you could use to describe Mulholland Drive.
Besides the similarities in their names (both streets are in California), the movies are about Hollywood, with the name Betty appearing in each. Just as the plot twist in Mulholland Drive reveals that Betty is actually Diane, who dies after dreaming up the first half of the film in Sunset Boulevard, we later discover that our narrator has been dead the whole time.
The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)
The influence of The Wizard of Oz is so apparent in all of Lynch’s work that you can watch a documentary called Lynch/Oz and dive head-first into the idea. The movie’s use of surrealism, its Technicolour world, and its exploration of dreams versus reality – good versus evil – has had a mammoth impact on the filmmaker’s oeuvre. In Mulholland Drive, there are several parallels that can be drawn between it and the classic Victor Fleming movie.
Most obvious is the dream world that Diane has crafted, forming Betty as a Dorothy-like figure – naive and excitable. Hollywood is like the land of Oz, where evil lurks, and one of Betty’s main aims in the movie is to help Rita ‘get back home’. The jitterbug scene is a reference to a similar one in Oz, and the name of the diner, Winkies, is taken from the name of the guards with green faces from Fleming’s film.
Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946)
When we meet Rita, she is nameless and mysterious, having just experienced a car accident that has left her with amnesia. She stumbles into a house belonging to Betty’s aunt, and soon, Rita and Betty begin their affair. Yet, because Rita can’t remember her real name, she takes it from a poster of Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth. Still, Lynch clearly didn’t pick the film at random. In one scene, he even positions the image of Hayworth’s face on the poster in a mirror that Rita is standing near, establishing similarities between the characters.
Hayworth’s Gilda is a classic femme fatale, just like Rita. The scene emphasises that Rita is a character no more real than Gilda, and we soon discover that she is a figment of Diane’s imagination, based on a woman named Camilla. Just like Gilda, Rita has the power to make her love interests crazy – she literally drives Diane to madness.