Mulholland Drive: Lost in the City of Dreams and Nightmares – Reactor

Lynch’s masterpiece, and one of the greatest films about Hollywood ever made…

By Kali Wallace | Published on February 26, 2025

All artists are more than the sum of their inspirations, but it can be interesting to take a look at those inspirations when discussing an artist’s work. It’s particularly interesting when we’re talking about a film like Mulholland Drive (2001), a movie about Hollywood that is very much in conversation with the Hollywood tradition of both mythologizing and exposing the art and business of making movies.

So we’ll start with a brief tour of some of David Lynch’s favorite movies.

Back in the mid-1970s, when film student David Lynch was making Eraserhead (1977), he had the crew sit down to watch Billy Wilder’s 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard. Ever since its release, Sunset Boulevard has been regarded as one of the most quintessential Hollywood movies about Hollywood. It tells the story of a struggling screenwriter who takes up residence with a reclusive, delusional former silent film star. It’s bleak, it’s funny, it’s clever, it’s narrated by a dead man, and it’s all about how people in Hollywood manipulate and exploit each other to grasp at fame. Lynch considered Wilder one of his favorite filmmakers, and stated, “Sunset Boulevard just has the greatest mood; you’re immersed in it like a dream.”

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