Tina Turner as Aunt Entity in MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME (1985).
As a kid, I was on my own a lot. I used to sort of walk around in my own fantasy world, where only I knew the way. I always had little obsessions, fascinations, fads. I composed songs with nonsense words in my head, which I can still sing verbatim.
Around the time MAD MAX III came out one of the mental images that got stuck in my head for a while was Tina Turner as Aunt Entity. I don’t know why, I’m not sure I even saw the film back then. I just thought about the character a lot, like her appearance contained a hidden message for me. She looked stern and troubled, charismatic. Aunt Entity, queen of a derelict hell-hole. I only have to look at these images—and zap, I’m right back in those empty sunless rooms of my childhood home.
Once upon a time, in a tropical island far away, there lived a strange woman […] she was caught in a giant spider web that grew out of her own body. One day a shipwrecked man drifted onto the beach. She fed him and cared for his wounds. She nourished him with love and brought him back to life. When he awoke, he gazed up at the spider woman and saw a perfect tear drop slide from under her mask.
