What’s Love Got to Do With It?

1. Business

Touchstone Pictures released What’s Love Got to Do With It? June 9th, 1993 to much acclaim. The film would go on to earn approximately $39 million in the United States, netting a profit of $24 million domestically. Strong performances by both the male and female leads earned Oscar nominations for Lawrence Fishburne and Amanda Bassett, certainly a surprise for Fishburne who turned the role of Ike Turner down five times before he finally accepted after hearing Bassett had signed on as Tina. The films exposure stemmed from the public fascination with Ike and Tina Turner’s turbulent personal relationship which was still relevant publically because of Ike Turner’s cocaine conviction just two years before filming began. Arguably the strong performances by both Bassett and Fishburne are what propelled this biopic to later earn a substantial $18.25 million in renting revenues in addition to its promising showing at the box office.

2. Genre

The film’s status as a biopic puts it in a category known for the liberties it takes in order to comprehensively express the fundamental happenings of a person’s life on screen. Roger Ebert, speaking about biopics said, "those who seek the truth about a man from the film of his life might as well seek it from his loving grandmother” (Ebert). With that in mind, What’s Love Got to Do With It? likely gets a pass in terms of the more dramatic aspects of the script which are obviously compressed for drama. A slight bit of digging into the veracity of the movie will show that Anna Mae a.k.a. Tina Turner, never had a friend such as Jackie in real life at all (IMDB). Tina never had someone constantly in her life that also brought her into faith’s salvation through Buddhism. But supposing that Jackie is a composite of characters and relationships that Tina maintained over the years of her life with the outside world, Jackie makes sense as a narrative device. Jackie as a composite alone would have fit this film comfortably into classical designation for its label as a biopic. It maintains a comprehensive start to finish narrative of Tina Turner’s life and stardom, and pivotally, her abusive relationship with the man who “made her”, Ike Turner.

Mr. Turner, played by Fishburne is vilified throughout as a manipulator and emotional terrorist, not only of his wife Tina, but of nearly everyone around him. How true to life Ike’s behavior is in the film remains a subject of conjecture, however. Several events which locate much of the tension between Ike and Tina are fictional. Notably, there are two scenes which detail almost everything a person who’s never heard of Tina Turner might need to know about her past. The first is a scene in which Ike, Tina, and another couple are in a diner sometime in the early 1970’s––judging facetiously from Ike’s glasses. Ike, always the showman, orders a whole cake to the table during breakfast hours at the diner. He then shoves an entire piece of cake maliciously into Tina’s face, which kicks off a violent altercation between the four people at the table, with Tina’s girlfriend storming off in anger and shame.

The scene is fictional, but what it does for the development of Ike and Tina’s relationship on screen is real: Tina brushes Ike’s actions off as a joke, and sits back down at the table as if nothing has happened when the altercation expires. It shows us exactly how under Ike’s thumb Tina would have been everyday with Ike essentially acting as her manager and husband, in control nearly every way imaginable. The second fictional scene which works for plot development is taken from the words Tina used to describe her sexual relationship to Ike in her autobiography on which the screenplay is based. While Ike Turner has publicly denied any validity in the on screen rape which happens in an empty studio in the midst of Ike’s other abuses, Tina Turner has affirmed that their sexual relations during the time of Ike’s abuse felt like rape. How necessary was it to include an actual rape rather than optionally having Tina come to this realization is up for debate. Certainly the rape was included to characterize Ike Turner, cementing him as Tina’s biggest obstacle towards career success and domestic happiness.

3. Feminist Theory

Interest in Tina Turner’s story as a pop icon would have been enough to get her story adapted from an autobiography into a movie. Her other status as that of an iconic, outspoken victim of domestic violence has more likelihood of ending up as the punchline of a lousy joke about domestic abuse than it does the subject of discussion among pop culture critics. Feminist critic Diane Shoos in her article “Representing Domestic Violence: Ambivalence and Difference in ‘What's Love Got to Do with It’” makes the case decrying the ambivalence of modern society towards abused women. “Having heard the voices of battered women and seen their photos, many people––including many feminists––still only have superficial knowledge of the emotional labyrinth of the lived experience of domestic violence”. Because we are not implicated in the transgressions, Shoos says, “We thus fail to understand the scope depth of the abuser’s control which may assert itself through physical, psychological, social, and financial means” (Shoos 58). Ike Turner represents all of these methods of control over his wife. From a feminist perspective, What’s Love Got to Do With It? is a “black new wave” Hollywood film that catalogues the journey of a physically and emotionally battered woman who goes on to win multiple Grammy Awards only after she escapes her abuse. It is therefore a nuanced triumph of a black female who escapes not only a lower class background, but also an abusive situation––quite a miraculous feat for little Anna Mae from Nutbush, Tennessee.

But there are holes in this vision of Tina Turner as a strong role model for feminist liberations. Shoos dismisses this vision of Turner by illuminating the perspective of those who survive the trauma through quoting Lewis Herman, “survivors of trauma attribute their survival more to good luck than any mental or emotional strength” (Shoos 63). This quote, backed up by anecdotal research exposes how inconsequential victims feel about their circumstances, so much so that their survival is, to them, purely a matter of chance.

The value that can be extracted from What’s Love Got to Do With It? as a film from a feminist perspective can be in its portrayal of a woman who should have all the agency she needs to leave her abuser but cannot because of the accompanying manipulation: Tina should have money, fame, friends, recognition. But instead of these things, Tina has pure fear, which is to say that she has nothing of the success she has poured her heart into achieving. Of course, to categorize Tina Turner as a victim of domestic is to also negate other consequential aspects of her identity that feminists like Shoos seek to remind us of. To portray women solely as victims in situations of domestic abuse does not encourage the abuse, but it does normalize the image of a woman being beaten to society as a whole, so much so that it leads to the ambivalence Shoos article works to combat.

4. Race

In 1986 Spike Lee heralded the Black New Wave cinematic movement when he released “She’s Gotta Have It” at Cannes Film Festival. Ebert, the eminent critic of his day notes in a column from 1991 that the film, “was a break with the two central paths of black-oriented films of earlier years: It was neither a self-conscious socially-responsible film, bearing a liberal message, nor was it an exploitation film, using sex and violence as it's currency” (Ebert). Spike Lee ushered in a new model of black cinema that was finally a realistic representation of the black experience in America, at least as far as Hollywood could take it anyway. “As a film critic who had seen virtually every "black film" of the past 20 years, I felt at once I was seeing something new here: A film not only made by blacks, and about blacks, but for blacks,” Ebert wrote about Spike Lee’s directorial debut.

Fast Forward seven years later and a biographical film about a black, female, Rock ‘n Roll star was being produced and directed by a white, English director that would go on to sell millions of tickets. Turner’s popularity in music naturally transcended her race or her victimization, but her story being told in Hollywood does have its roots in Spike Lee’s trailblazing. Inescapably, most of the film’s characters are black. It is important that these characters are not focused on their race or the discrimination levied against them or elements of black culture which would be novelly exotic to white audiences. Turner’s story is told as her story which happens to have similarities to millions of other people’s stories for a variety of reasons not particular to race. It is not a specific story only valued by a marginalized segment of society e.g. Black America; it is a parable of success that is dramatically realized through a Hollywood screenplay.

5. Plot Semiotics & Story Language

When Tina is still Anna Mae in Nutbush, the first scene the audience comes into contact with her she is doing two distinct things which set a tonality for the rest of the film: singing and disobeying her choir director. Her disobedience resonates with us as a seemingly innocent act of childhood tomfoolery. This encapsulation says it all––Anna Mae isn’t scared of authority, and she won’t be silenced. In terms of narrative structure, another major shift is when Anna Mae moves to St. Louis in 1958. Here she will eventually meet and fall in love with Ike Turner. St. Louis is shown as a place with far more opportunity than Nutbush, but still a hard place to earn a living for a black girl with few skills and not much education. Obviously as the audience, we are not in suspense about how these prospects will play out for Anna Mae, but other important developments are taking place during this part of the film. Ike is introduced; he is shown to be a vibrant off stage personality with a creative musical genius that seems to propel and inspire those he comes into contact to––all laying the foundations for Tina and Ike as both a romantic item and as a stage duo.

Ike’s intentions are selfish, but since they also involve the welfare of Anna Mae, it’s hard to root against Ike succeeding in taking Anna Mae out of St. Louis and on to the road where she can build her career. As the film tells it, Anna Mae is noticed by Ike one night when she is handed the microphone during a crowd sing-a-long at a St. Louis club. This is significant because it casts Ike as an opportunist––he sees Anna Mae as a potential ‘Tina’ type star and pours his resources and time into helping her pursue a career which he plans to use to make them both wealthy through music. Once he’s shown to be someone on the lookout for opportunity, he also demonstrates his connections to the music business and the rest is history. The whole set up of the plot to follow relies heavily on Ike as a functional catalyst.

In conclusion What’s Love Got to Do With It? can be remembered positively in most aspects that matter. The subject matter is something American cinema is always keen on optioning in Hollywood studios because of the big potential draw of lifelong fans and devotees eager for an inside peek at the life of someone whose work they deeply admire. There is an added satisfaction in knowing the hardships our role models faced on their way to the top. Biopics like this one enable our fandoms to be taken to new highs by connecting us with a deeper meaning in the context of a famous individual’s career.

Works Cited

Ebert, Roger. "The Hurricane." All Content. Rogerebert.com, 7 Jan. 2000. Web. 19 Nov. 2013.

Ebert, Roger. "It's High Tide for Black New Wave." All Content. Rogerebert.com, 26 May 1991. Web. 19 Nov. 2013.

Shoos, Diane. "Representing Domestic Violence: Ambivalence and Difference in What's Love Got to Do with It." NWSA Journal 15.2 (2003): 57-77. Print.

"What's Love Got to Do with It." IMDb. IMDb.com, n.d. Web. 18 Nov. 2013.