Friday, March 25, 2011

Tura. Fucking. Satana.

Don't call her Miss. Don't call her Tura SAYtana. You call her Tura Fucking Satana and you pray for mercy and sex.

I have a number of other entries in my head, many of which feel too masturbatingly self-centered to post in a row. I have no qualms about full disclosure and self-reflection, but I know how the Internet works (my boyfriend bought me this book!), that its primary purpose is exhibitionism which, if abused, is god-awful obnoxious and arrogant, even if the content is self-effacing (= compliment-demanding, often). One of these, however, is a very serious and pointed essay on a large life decision I've made, which I want to share with anyone who'll read it and hopefully gain understanding and acceptance for it. It has to do with putting medical school on the back-burner, or tabling it for good, in favor of opening my options to other, equally exciting and meaningful paths. In a non-hippie way. I'll give you the details later.

For now, something more important compels me. The death of Elizabeth Taylor, our fag-hag ally advocate beautiful scandalous queen-on-earth, pains me, makes me want to watch Suddenly Last Summer or Cleopatra or another of her masterpieces - and her compatriot in beauty and awesome, Jane Russell - but beyond this, it reminds me of another recent death...A death honored admirably by many, but only in very specific segments of our world, and much more widely overlooked. The death of an amazing, awe-inspiring, actual hero-goddess of a woman:

Tura Goddamned Satana.


If you know who she is, you know enough to know that her death is a loss that the world does not deserve. Hopefully you've read other elegies that do her even more justice than my paltry words might. Despite this, I am driven to personally express my grief and worship of this hero of mine, who even to her death remained an image of sexiness, confidence, intimidation and beauty in all forms, longevity and not-putting-up-with-your-shit-ness.

Her most powerful and career-defining role is without a doubt in the overlooked classic by that mastophilic master director, Russ Meyer: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! You must, must see this entire black-and-white magnum opus in its entirety, not even just in shitty quality on YouTube, but here is one of Tura's best scenes, delivered in a shout that pierces heaven and jock-straps alike:



She plays a thinly-veiled reflection of herself, named Varla. Varla is a tough fucking bitch with a black-belt in Aikido, a pair of otherworldly orbs barely restrained by a tightblack dominatrix gang-girl cat-suit, hair and eyes that could slice through granite and a chip on her goddamned shoulder. She can out-drive a cyclone. She can karate chop the pussy out of you. She's probably bisexual because what wouldn't want her, what couldn't be subdued by her power beyond human words? I hate to break it to you, but nudity is absent from this film. Close, but not nearly to the extent one would hope, especially comparing to Meyers' later, debatably better works like my personal favorite, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Far from being pigeon-holed, Tura owned the face out of her role and lived the life of Varla, the clothes and the attitude and the hair, to her grave. She gave it to the world at large at conventions for the benefit of humanity. Her other roles were meaty but she wisely and without resentment never tried to surpass or shed the skin of Varla the Mighty.

Tura went on to star in such classics as The Astro-Zombies and a few others, which I thankfully still have time to enjoy. From what I've seen, her assets and attitude are on display as they rightfully should be, but an alarmingly less butch aesthetic is employed – strikingly refreshing, arousing, and a testament to her damned good range as an actress and as a body. Her body and sex appeal were by far not all there was to her, but she had no shame in them and owned them as much as Stephen Hawking owns his intellect, or George Carlin owns his wit.


Perhaps the most amazing and admirable aspect of Ms. Satana was her life itself. Her back-story is widely accepted to be right out of one of her pictures, a parade of sex, violence, exploitation and vigor, a crime novel of epic proportions, the origin story of an amazonian warrior queen. Born to a Japanese father and a white, Native-American mother, Tura moved from Japan to America at a young age, in a time far from ideal for an interracial, and especially part-Japanese, girl. She spent time in an internment camp with her family. She reportedly developed her trademark chest at a painfully young age, and this only heaped more ridicule upon her from her peers.

Here is where a tragic turn morphs into a legend. I accept that it will incur skepticism, and probably rightfully so, but I embrace it as Christians embrace scripture, but with even more credulity and empirical standing. Tura was gang-raped at the age of 9 by five men. Her response? Throwing herself into an intense study of martial arts, primarily Aikido, to the point of mastery. The judge who heard her case, supposedly bribed by someone, and in a period known for its ignominious categorization of rape and tendency to blame the victim or overlook the crime entirely, let the criminals off the hook and sent Tura to good old-fashioned reform school, that den of forced lesbianism and gang violence.

Perhaps eschewing the lesbianism, Tura duly made herself at home in the gang community, and went on to establish a girl gang in her home town, rightfully standing as its proud Caesar, which was dedicated to hunting down and brutally punishing the men who mistreated women and girls in her neighborhood. She claims the girls of her town never felt safer than under their guardian fists. And in the meantime, Tura went on to utilize her newly-seeded aggression, confidence and physical skill to purposefully hunt down each and every one of her attackers and dole out precisely the vendetta-motivated, dubiously legal justice they deserved. It is unknown whether they lived, were sexually assaulted, or otherwise maimed, but Tura claims they didn't recognize her until she told them, and she showed no mercy.

After this, at the age of 13 or so, as we are told, Tura got eyes for the big lights and made her way to Hollywood. The beloved star of silent screen and director Harold Lloyd was instantly enamored, along with the rest of the world, and simply had to take somewhat sensuous photos of the girl with the fake ID. Some pictures out there claim to be from Lloyd, and may very well reveal her overdeveloped 13-year-old self, but this is probably less likely than the existence of the Traci Lords tape. Yet it is without doubt that her sex appeal was both inherent and thoroughly owned by her at a young age, in defiance of her young violation. I believe Tura went on to dance, tried to make it, then received lead poisoning from her makeup and went back home or elsewhere, unable to paint her face as was the custom.

Tura then went on to a successful career as a shameless, proud exotic dancer. She did burlesque. She did plain old stripping. And she was quite literally nationally regarded as among the very, very best at it. Her face, personality, style, body, danger, and everything about her smashed audiences into submission and made them want more, want to be dominated and to dominate alike. She later decried the recent burlesque renaissance and wore her stripper crown without qualms. Her parents were even supportive of her titillating stardom.

The rest is history, as she found her way to Russ Meyers' doorstep, followed by Traci Lords', jumped from one exploitation flick to another, and made her way off into the night for many years to live a somewhat normal life stripping, then nursing, then doing whatever it was a woman of her mettle can do in the world. She married, she had children, she was shot by an ex-lover and kept kicking in her latter days as a nurse and on the convention circuit. In retrospect she got the goddamned respect she had deserved from the first. She gained weight and nothing, nothing changed.

Listen to it in her own brazen, man-melting words:



Tura Satana died only this year. She gave Quentin Tarantino tentatively her blessing on his supposed remake of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! The false rumor of Britney Spears' casting elicited the threat to “castrate” Tarantino, and her contribution to the original film as well as advising the as-yet-unmade remake ended up surpassing that of the actual filmmakers. Most recently, I believe, she guested in the upcoming Sugar Boxx, whose trailer outrageously neglects to include her posthumous image, far as I can tell. Among other things, it looks like a winner on all counts:



There is no doubt much more to be said of Tura Satana. Many writers have done her greater justice. Those lucky enough to survive her presence, her biography with Russ Meyer, and the preserved image of the woman herself attest to her divinity and sinfulness. She is one of few heroes of mine, up there with Oscar Wilde, Stephen Fry, and Alexander the Great. I hope those of you culturally-deprived enough to have overlooked this goddess have bothered to scan to the end of this too-long post, or at the least have enjoyed the pictures and maybe even videos. I don't believe in an afterlife, but if she was lucky enough to end up in an alternate universe version of one devised by Michio Kaku or some other quantum asshole, I am confident she has since pounded the ever-loving shit out of it until it winced the words, through bloodied teeth, “TURA. FUCKING. SATANA.”

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