Live Through This
Tina Turner didn’t just survive. She transcended.
the story of Tina Turner has been told before. It was partially shared in a People magazine interview back in 1981, the first time the singer publicly described the abuse she had endured during her 16-year marriage to her musical partner, Ike Turner. It was laid out in more detail in her autobiography, I, Tina, co-written with Kurt Loder, and then again in the 1993 movie based on that autobiography, What’s Love Got to Do With It.
But Tina Turner has not told her story the way it is told in Tina, the HBO documentary debuting on March 27. Positioning itself as the definitive account of the life and career of this rock-and-roll pioneer, the documentary enables Turner, now 81, to discuss the full breadth of her existence in her own words while speaking directly to the camera. Tina is sweeping, fascinating, and, because of Turner’s participation, deeply personal. It frames itself as the final word on this music legend, strongly implying in its closing moments—which include a montage of Turner taking bows during performances through the years—that this two-hour movie is essentially her farewell to the wider world.
“How do you bow out slowly, just go away?” she asks, rhetorically, in Tina. Apparently, the answer is this: with a moving film that feels like a summation of who Tina Turner is yet leaves viewers wanting just a little bit more. Perhaps that’s appropriate. A great artist is always supposed to exit the stage with the audience craving encores. (Given that Turner was recently nominated to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for the first time as a solo artist, it seems fair to say she’s not going to
disappear from the landscape just yet.)
Directed by Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin, who won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar in 2012 for Undefeated, Tina focuses its first 50 minutes or so on Turner’s partnership with Ike, which began as something akin to a mentorship, then turned romantic and, after that, into something much darker. What she endured in that relationship for many years—the violence, in the form of thirddegree burns and black eyes; the minimizing of her personhood; the shame that drove her to gulp down an entire bottle of sleeping pills—is described in detail. When Turner recalls the aftermath of her suicide attempt and the fact that her pulse returned when Ike started talking to her in the hospital, her words are cast against imagery of her performing in the 1970s with an infectious grin on her face and tiny bubbles floating around her. That single pairing of sound and visuals captures the contradiction of her entire early career. Lindsay and Martin do a marvelous job of weaving in archival footage like this in ways that are illuminating and unconventional by music-documentary standards.
Even after Turner literally fled that marriage—sneaking out of a Dallas hotel and running through oncoming freeway traffic to get away—the specter of Ike still lingered. She first tried to exorcise him by doing a 1981 interview with Carl Arrington, the music editor of People at the time, in which she explained the true nature of their marriage. This was long before Me Too; for Turner, it was more like Just Me. Domestic abuse was not discussed openly in that era. To speak as frankly as she did was a risk. Turner says she was so nervous about it that she consulted her psychic to find out if the move would obliterate her career. “She said, ‘No, Tina,’ ” Turner recalls. “‘It’s going to do just the opposite. It’s going to break everything wide open.’ ”
What that psychic didn’t tell her was that, despite the massive success she would achieve with the solo album Private Dancer and others that followed, her past would continue to loom. She would be asked constantly about her ex-husband in interviews during the 1980s—Tina features a clip of a reporter inquiring about her thoughts on Ike’s recent cocaine arrest while she was doing press for the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. She says she agreed to publish I, Tina to “get the journalists off my back.” It didn’t work. The book begot the movie, starring Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne, and still more conversation about the most traumatic moments in her life. Even though her resilience inspired many, for her, every revisitation of that era meant probing open wounds.
The unfortunate fact is that part of what makes Tina Turner so remarkable is that she got away from Ike and had the guts to tell her story at a time when such truths were not being told. But an even bigger part of what makes Tina Turner so remarkable, as Tina’s filmmakers understand, is the fact that she’s Tina fucking Turner. The film drives that point home via interviews with people who know and admire her, including backup singers, her longtime manager Roger Davies, Oprah Winfrey, and Bassett, as well as plenty of footage of the woman originally known as Anna Mae Bullock onstage in the 1960s and later. There truly aren’t words for the amount of energy and sensuality she brought to every performance. On the Phil Spector–produced “River Deep–Mountain High,” her voice can blow the glass out of your car windows and those of every other vehicle within a 30-mile radius. When she struts onstage in the late 1980s singing “What’s Love Got to Do With It” in front of a crowd that seems to stretch toward infinity, she is pure joy on a pair of legs so powerful they could seemingly stop traffic and, quite possibly, time itself.
The pain and the pride of being Tina Turner are forever intertwined, though some sources of her pain are not addressed here. The loss of one of her sons, Craig, to suicide in 2018 is not mentioned, although there is a dedication to him at the end of the movie. Her recent health troubles— including a 2017 kidney transplant she underwent thanks to an organ donation from her husband, Erwin Bach—are not mentioned either.
Nevertheless, the ways that tragedy and triumph have defined her come through loud and clear, particularly via audio of Turner talking to Loder in 1985 about the lack of love in her life, starting when both of her parents abandoned her in childhood. “Kurt, I’ve been through”—she smacks a table—“fucking tons of heartbreak. I’ve analyzed it. I’ve said, What’s wrong with me? I’ve looked in the mirror with myself stripped of makeup and without hair. Oh, can someone see the beauty in the woman … that I am?”