Murder, Mystery, and Makeup

Bailey Sarian, Lowbrow Pleasures, and Training-Wheel True Crime

In a break from working on this piece, I was on the couch in a brain-on-ice fugue state watching - yep - Love Island. When the ad break started, one came on touting ITV’s various murder dramas and documentaries across the screen in bold lettering. The brief ad culminated with a serene voiceover: ‘More true crime than ever before, only on ITV.’ 

Putting aside the timing, the cheerful female voice and her assurance that true crime content was on the upswing did strike me as funny. It was almost like she was saying: ‘as long as there are plenty of murders, you’ll have all the viewing material you’ll ever need’. I’m sure that’s not what the nice British lady meant, as she encouraged audiences to gather round with a cup of tea to watch stories about brutal homicide. But then again, you and I both know that any and every murder might eventually be grist for the content mill, such is the hunger for these stories. 

At the time of writing, true crime has been mainstreamed to the point of oblivion. I mean that in the sense that I think a lot of us hardly even actively distinguish it from most other popular film and TV genres. The Love Island advert was evidence enough of that. Whereas once it was one weird corner of pop culture -  a few late-night TV shows, or the fondness for Law & Order: SVU, the odd based-on-a-true-story serial killer flick - now it’s big business. There are podcasts like ‘Serial’ and ‘My Favorite Murder’ (where the sarcastic motto of ‘stay sexy and don’t get murdered’ originates from); Netflix’s endless churn of binge-watching materials; t-shirts that say ‘serial killer docs and chill’, like some kind of alt version of millennial wine mom merch. In the past three years, there have been two documentaries and a feature film about serial killer and rapist Ted Bundy, and this year it’s been announced that two more feature films about him are in the works. Yikes. 

You can look to countless sources to confirm that the majority of consumers of those stories are women; this is not news to anyone with a passing interest in true crime and/or an internet connection. The reasons, too, have been pretty well-explored - on that subject, I highly recommend Alice Bolin’s book Dead Girls. In short, it’s said that women empathise with the (mostly female) victims featured in these films and television. Or that out of a sense of catharsis and even self-preservation, we are darkly fascinated by the motives of male killers and the details of their crimes. While men might turn away in disgust, many women seem unable to stop looking. Writer Laura Barcella refers to true crime as ‘exposure therapy’, while P.E. Moskowitz, in their excellent piece, points out, ‘True crime validates us; it allows us to feel collectively what we’re often not allowed to discuss in public: Men are fucking scary, the world is fucking scary, and we have every fucking right to be scared.’

I wouldn’t call myself a huge devotee, but I have definitely dipped my toe in, catching up with talked-about, twisty programmes like Netflix’s Don’t Fuck With Cats, and devouring the smart-as-hell Mindhunter, which plays with true crime tropes and questions audience complicity (and satisfaction) at crucial junctures. I felt both fascinated by and deeply ambivalent about Joe Berlinger’s The Ted Bundy Tapes, and have always been curious about David Berkowitz (aka the Son of Sam), because my dad and aunt were young adults in 70s Yonkers during his killing spree. Spike Lee’s underrated Summer of Sam (1999) is a real favourite. But there’s one specific hangover balm of mine that makes me wonder if I rate as more than a medium on the white-girl-true-crime-self-awareness scale. That hangover balm is named Bailey Sarian. 

Bailey Sarian is a Youtuber with nearly 6 million subscribers, and nearly as many dollars in the bank. The chatty California native is about my age, and her background as a professional makeup artist gave little indication that she would become a Youtube superstar for a true crime series. But her ‘Murder, Mystery and Makeup Mondays’ - wherein she casually does a full face of makeup while conversationally sharing the details of often-chilling murder stories - is an enormous hit. People quote her little catchphrases, and her personal charisma is such that it doesn’t seem too annoying or twee. When I’m feeling glum or eager for a distraction, I’m quite happy to switch off my critical faculties and watch her talk about Jodi Arias, or Jeffrey Dahmer, or whatever else she pulls out of the file. But somehow, as it turns out, I find those pesky critical faculties coming back to me. 

I like Bailey, don’t get me wrong - I’ve spent a lot of time watching her videos, and she presents meticulous research in a factual and digestible way. She tries to let audiences make their minds up, and she never gets into vile particulars for the sake of it. Typically, the Youtuber’s tone is chirpy, even flip, in a way which makes tales of dismemberment and homicide more palatable. Conversely, Sarian provides an urgent moral sense to her storytelling, frequently expressing her disapproval and disgust as she sits there blending her blusher. It’s admittedly a strange juxtaposition of word and image, though it definitely demonstrates the link between the demographics of true crime and makeup tutorials (i.e., mainly women.) But there’s more to it, I think. Watching Bailey whack on blue eyeshadow as she talks, I realise there’s something simultaneously soothing and awful about it: the performance of femininity, a supposedly dainty art, mixed with these stories of brutality and depravity. Not all the victims she discusses are women, and she does deep-dives on notorious female killers too; but it’s clear who her audience will be. 

In one episode, on a murderer named Gertrude Baniszewski, Bailey admits she’s long avoided the case because of its disturbing and prolonged instances of child abuse. In the end, she says, she only picked the topic because her large fanbase kept requesting it; she looks out-of-sorts, even a tad queasy, by the conclusion, and apologises for ‘looking a bit down’. It’s as if she had - in that moment - begun to chafe against the limits of her own concept and format.

But before you know it, Bailey’s back on track. And so am I. My ambivalence doesn’t stop me from clicking, even as Bailey begins to say things that remind me how much the onus seems to be on white women feeling safer by displacing their fears onto these horror stories. In one aside, Bailey reminds her audience that if they’re ever attacked, they should claw at their attacker as much as possible. After all, in the worst case scenario, your killer’s DNA will be under your fingernails. This is the kind of thing that irritates me; what are the chances one of us will be murdered by a Dahmer or a Bundy, or even the guy next door? It’s possible, but the chances must be pretty slim. It’s straight out of the old true crime playbook: victimhood is spotlighted repeatedly, as is the individual psychology of the murderer, but so rarely is there much focus on larger systemic issues; what can and should be changed within communities, law enforcement, and the justice system. As author Rachel Monroe, whose book Savage Appetites is an invaluable dive into the subject, told The Guardian: 

‘I think a lot of true crime fandom, especially for women, exists in this zone between privilege and vulnerability. To enjoy it you need to be privileged enough to not live it in your daily reality – if it’s your own life, it’s hard to find entertaining – but also enough aware of your own vulnerability to empathize. It’s always complicated.’  

It’s impossible not to feel this is true when I watch Bailey Sarian, and to wonder what the unintended consequences are. For one thing, if white feminist true crime inevitably asks us to identify with homicide victims, of course law enforcement become savior figures in the bargain. Even when they are presented as bumbling, corrupt, or a combination of both, they still come out better than the psycho killers, right? It’s what some have called cop propaganda, though in the case of Sarian I think it’s largely unintentional - more just a propping up of the police as an obvious answer to a question she hasn’t thought much about. When all of this coalesces, it occurs to me that some true crime has the gross appeal of squeezing a spot. Bailey’s right there, and though she’s brushing foundation over hers, she’s out there in the open about it.

Of course, not all true crime is a millennial woman’s Youtube channel. That’s why there’s much more coming to you this month on the topic. But of all things, ‘Murder, Mystery and Makeup’ is the thing that seems to have really crept up on me, getting to the heart of something about women & true crime. Its unapologetic mixture of the traditionally girly and the matter-of-factly grotesque seems to shed light on other, perhaps more calculatedly solemn attempts. 

Listen: hats off to Bailey. She seems like a smart, sensitive person; she’s just operating within the modes and formats culture is presenting to her. And as ever, there’s room for growth. Her video examining the history of shady illegal activity around the invention of birth control is excellent; her work is growing more considered, angrier; even polemical. Halfway through 2021, with the true crime genre still ballooning, consumers are (hopefully) growing somewhat more discerning. A part of me likes to think that prevailing critiques have forced some self-awareness into what’s being commissioned and made, even down to the new season of trashy Netflix show I Am A Killer. (More on that soon.) But I think it’s more likely that the creators of true crime content are just adapting. Instead of Bailey Sarian’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach, there are more tricks, more cinematic sleight of hand, more faux-ethical training wheels to get the wary viewer onside. The lady in the ad last night was right - there is more true crime than ever before. And as long as it's out there, trading in stories of dead girls for the curiosity of living ones, we’re going to have to keep figuring out what to do with it. 

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