Identities and Realities in Ingmar Bergman's Persona and David Lynch's Muholland Drive

Its fascinating to see how ideas are adapted and transformed to an artists' own interpretations, and a perfect example I found was the ideas that are parallel between Ingmar Bergman's Persona to David Lynch's Muholland Drive. As you should be familiar with Persona, Muholland Drive basically has the same theme that two women's identities get mixed between each other (Movie Trailer).

Of course, Lynch tends to weave reality and surrealism together in his films, a technique he uses to suggest the ideas of alternate identities within dreams, sort of like an identity the subject wishes to have or achieve. He does this with Naomi Watt's character, who is started out in the film as Betty, an innocent actress striving to make it big, and half way through she plays a bleak, failed actress Diane who seemed to have dreamed up the identity of Betty. As in relation to Bergman, the idea of a persona is an identity the subject wants other to perceive them as even though that may not be the subject's true identity. Both women's identities merge together to a persona, confronting each others hidden guilt they hide because of their persona. Additionally, both films work with in the subconcious, from Bergman's montage of images in the beginning to Lynch's dreamlike characters beside a dumpster and at a play. In addition, both films use close ups at a great extent to help portray emotional instabilities within their alternate identities. And even Lynch acknowledges his influence from Bergman in Muholland Drive, by splicing an image of both women faces into one just like Bergman did in Persona.

- Cassie Hanks