Stop Saying "Style Over Substance"
They're the same thing!
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Today, I take a sledgehammer to an overused cliché in film criticism...
It’s hard to define "style over substance”, but, like charisma and hardcore pornography, we seem to know it when we see it.
It’s not a new criticism. Here’s Akira Kurosawa casually disembowelling style-heavy directors back in 1964:
Today, “style over substance” is one of the most overused attacks in film discourse, levied against everyone from Wes Anderson to Wong Kar-wai.
Now, just because it’s a cliché doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Clichés persist for a reason — they distil generational wisdom into a pocket-sized soundbite. Handy! But I’m more interested in whether a cliché is useful. Does it open up discussion… or shut it down?
Well, far be it from me to take issue with the big K-man, but I think this line of attack has had its day.
Part of the problem is that when people talk about “style” they are often referring to a specific kind of style.
Some people just mean the coolest. So, the most stylish movie would be the one in black sunglasses and a bomber jacket, taking a puff of a cigarette while listening to Velvet Underground.
Others mean the most — more cuts, more music, more movement. So the coke-fueled hysteria of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights would de facto be more stylish than the more restrained, controlled The Master (and, by implication, less substantive). Likewise, the hyper-stylized worlds of Wes Anderson would, by default, be more stylish than the raw observational reality of someone like Kelly Reichardt.
But these are just types of styles. Ultimately every movie makes a series of choices about how it tells its story, and the totality of those choices amounts to its style.
Here’s the key point: a movie’s style is inseparable from its substance. Otherwise, it would be possible to make a film that is 100% substance and 0% style. What would that even look like? Someone in a suit monotonally reading Das Kapital into an iPhone camera? Even that would have a style, an aesthetic choice that shapes how we interpret the information.
A movie is not substance with style scraped over it like butter on cold toast. Style is substance.
Marin Scorsese is an impeccably stylish director. But his films have different rhythms. The fast-cutting, needle-dropping mania of Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed and Wolf of Wall Street contained those films’ critiques of excess and intoxicating, slippery moral decay. Then we have Silence, whose themes of faith, isolation and endurance were brought to life via a sparse, static style. If Scorsese had made Silence with the cat-that’s-got-the-cream hysteria of something like Goodfellas, it wouldn’t only have felt like a different film; it would have been saying something different. The substance would have changed.
If we accept that style contains rather than competes with substance, it unlocks far more interesting questions. The great Indian director Satyajit Ray, reflecting on a meeting with the equally great French director Jean Renoir, recounts:
At first glance, this reads as another style vs substance argument. But I think there is a second layer here that is far more interesting. The question isn’t whether style gets in the way of substance; it’s what emotional, subjective human truth the style communicates.
All movies have something to say. It may not be profound, it may not be political, it may not be important, but they do all have a point of view, a specific perspective. This is just as true for the ill-fated 2009 James Corden-starring comedy Lesbian Vampire Killers as for Citizen Kane. Movies are made by humans, and humans are subjective.
One of the great joys of watching movies is trying to unpack their perspective. This doesn’t mean reducing them to a neat set of messages (to paraphrase Sam Goldwyn, that’s what Western Union is for). Quite the opposite — it’s less a process of translation than an ongoing conversation, one which evolves each time you watch a film. A movie’s style is part of, not a distraction from, this conversation.
It’s always more rewarding to listen than to dismiss. To wave something away as “style over substance” is the critical equivalent of farting in an elevator, a categorical statement that is guaranteed to preclude any further discussion.
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While I understand your complaint, especially when it comes to directors like Wes Anderson who have both style and substance, there are times when the "style over substance" critique is valid. One example that comes to mind is the movie Boy Kills World, which tried so damn hard to be stylish, but was completely empty substance-wise. There are many other films that do similar things, layering elements that seem cool on top of stories ideas that lack anything worthwhile outside of that style.
I suppose the issue here is whether "style over substance" is meant to be a starting point or an ending point for a critique. Critics who make that claim should explore what they mean rather than delivering a pronouncement that is meant to end the conversation. That is, they need to provide some substance of their own and be open to potential conflicting viewpoints rather than deciding that they're the ultimate arbiter of whether a movie has committed the sin of being too stylish to be taken seriously.
"Any work of art consists of more than verbal thoughts that can be paraphrased verbally. You can't reduce any novel or poem to an intelligible single meaning." - Ursula K. Le Guin. And I think this applies to films as well.