Style over Substance – A Critique of Emptiness
by Ben Creech
Only God Forgives (2013)
I don’t quite know what it means, but I left the theatre for Only God Forgives with a smile on my face. It’s a brutal anti-revenge flick, a nauseous fever dream, but one punctuated with a kind of surprising absurdity, like the half-joke someone makes after an awkward, embarrassing confession. In many ways the film is a continuation of the previous film by the director Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011’s Drive; in just as many it is a jarring departure. Both are characterized by an overwhelming abundance of style, even an obsessive fascination with the sheen and texture of colors and surfaces more than the narratives that carry them along. They each have stories, mind you, plots that define the worlds they live in, and yet the two films were received in polar opposite ways. While Drive was one of the best-reviewed films of the year, Only God Forgives is vying for one of the worst, sitting pretty with a strong 35/100 on Metacritic.
This kind of turnaround isn’t unheard of: Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is one of the most famous flops in the history of cinema, and it was hot on the heels of The Deer Hunter. The thing that has caught my attention though is not so much that it is being critically panned, but the language that sits at the center of these pans. Most critics are accusing Only God Forgives of privileging “style over substance,” or some variation therein. David Edelstein puts it in the title: “An Awful Stylized Exercise in Stylish Style”; Michael Phillips’ only compliment for Refn is his skill in interior design; Variety’s Peter Debruge calls it “an exercise in supreme style and minimal substance”; the examples are numerous. Sitting at the center of most of the criticisms of the film is an apparent dearth of so-called “substance” and an excess (call it pretentious, call it indulgent) of “style.”
For me, I think that this is an incorrect way of stating their issues with the film. We have come to think, as film-goers, that style and substance are opposed to one another, opposite ends of a spectrum on which all art can be placed. In this system, the best films lie clearly in or near the center, with an appropriate balance of style and substance, and anything that teeters too far in either direction is to be rebuked for its indulgent wanderings. But this doesn’t seem quite right to me. It seems that throughout its history, anything that lays claim to art cinema has at its inception fallen victim to these cries, from the early works of FW Murnau to recent endeavors by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Furthermore, style and substance, as I will show, are inextricably bound, tied up together, inseparable. Style is simply the way in which substance presents itself, it articulates and defines the substance; style cannot exist without it. These critics have legitimate issues with the film(s), but those are not issues that stem from a lack of substance; rather they are symptoms of a primary misrecognition of substance.
Sucker Punch (2011)
Before I get ahead of myself, though, let’s take a minute to consider the criticism. What do we mean when we say a given work has too much style and too little substance? In everyday speaking this concern is, quite simply, that a work doesn’t really seem to be about much. (“It’s pretty, but is it art?”) The substance of a film boils down to the what while the style is the how. It pays attention to its formal qualities, which it appears to execute with the precision of a master, whether those qualities are cinematography, lighting, editing, or occasionally acting (though this component seems typically to qualify for substance). On one end of this spectrum might be director Zach Snyder, whose films often fall prey to this criticism. Sucker Punch, for example, had a number of sequences that were lauded for their technical abilities; thematically and emotionally, however, critics failed to connect to it. Substance appears to need both of these things: thematic unity/cohesion and emotional resonance/consistency.
Take as another example Xavier Dolan’s 2011 film Les Amours Imaginaires (a.k.a. Heartbeats). The film is not as widely seen here in the US, but that’s just as well. Check out the short, stylish trailer below, and the style/substance criticism seems to be perfectly applicable to this film. It has long sequences in slow motion, the production design (costumes, lighting, cinematography) pops, and by and large the film seems to be about attractive people (including the director himself) longingly looking at each other. Considering that the gaze of the camera is simply substituted for the nexus of gazes constituted by the characters, and we have a film that is virtually tautologically self-indulgent, stylish and insubstantial. Because it appears to be interested in taking pictures to capture the qualities of physical attraction, we might even go so far as to say that the “substance” of Heartbeats is analogous to the film it is printed on: mere celluloid, printed with images that have themselves as their only reference.
But see, this is precisely the point. If nothing else, Dolan’s film lives in a world where the thinness of attraction and desire is manifest. The film is not about the fact that these characters long for one another, lust after one another, or look at each other – it is about how they do all this. While this is captured through the stylistic gestures of the film, from its vibrant, abstract tableaux to its slow-mo, hip-soundtracked sequences, they are not, nor can they be, divorced from the substance of the piece. Critics who defend stylish works like this will often resort to retorting that in these films the style is the substance, but I don’t think its quite that, either. Rather, the style directs us towards the substance, it signals it, draws it out, and identifies it for us, so that we might recognize it.
Attempting to separate style from substance is not only a futile task – it is an absurd one. And yet the criticism that a given film lacks substance has persisted for decades (in cinema, that is; much longer in other media), even if such a claim is later revised. There is even an insidious historical edge to this criticism: it seems to be predominantly directed to films that are otherwise valued as high art – films that experiment with form, forging new ways of making meaning in the cinema, from the works of Godard to Tarkovsky. Now I’m not trying to suggest that the criticism of a film’s insubstantial quality is characteristic of a certain philistinism; rather, I believe that the critique of emptiness stems from a fundamental misapprehension of the film at hand.
Night of the Hunter (1955)
These critics who label a film empty aren’t idiots (though some might beg to differ). It’s not as if these voices come from a single place of overly puritanical or conservative criticism – these voices can be heard across the critical spectrum. When Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter came out, it was universally panned, because the film seemed to be too loose with its stylistic gestures, flaunting beautiful images without much of a thematic, emotional, or ethical core to ground them. Now we recognize it as a masterpiece (and it is one of my personal top ten favorite films). What happened in the decades between its premiere and its resurrection? I think when we saw it upon its release we expected it to be a particular kind of film, and when the film was different, was interested in other things, was focused on stranger themes, was on the fringe of cinema, we failed to recognize what it’s substance was. The film was never empty, but we saw it as empty because we thought it was going to be filled with something else.
This seems to be the central disconnect present in many of these films. I was recently ensconced in a debate over the 2002 M. Night Shyamalan film Signs. As soon as it was mentioned, a friend immediately criticized the aliens’ invasion strategy, in particular, their failure to recognize that the planet was covered in something that posed a deadly threat to them. For him, the film was no good, it had no value, because a film must make sense, and this clearly did not. What my friend missed, though, is that this is not what the film is about. The film is in no way concerned with the aliens that attempt to invade Earth, or their techniques and mistakes. Signs is about family and faith, about the relationships between people in the face of an immense catastrophe. Now we could debate whether or not it is any good, but my friend and I were essentially talking about two different films. Many of the criticisms of emptiness are plagued by this misapprehension: they mistake certain moments or themes as central to the film, and when those aren’t explored, to them, the film appears to have never been about anything at all. (To reduce it to a straw man, imagine someone watching Citizen Kane as if it were a biopic of William Randolph Hearst; the film would quickly lose its appeal and appear to make several biographical errors, and the viewer might soon tire of it. Yet the film endures…)
The other thing that binds the films frequently accused of lacking substance is their concern with surfaces. I’m not suggesting that they are all surface, or all style, or something like that, but that their concern is with the thin layer between performance and identity, between cinema and reality, between masks and the faces they hide. Think of an egg: an egg without a yolk might be called empty and without substance, because it lacks the thing we are used to seeing within it. But a Faberge egg, while decadent, is not lacking in beauty. These films, too, are seemingly thin, but are interested in the things that lie between the cracks, the identities that hide behind the faces, the particular modality of the image itself (not necessarily the thing it represents so much as embodies).
To return to the film I began with, many critics have expressed their disappointment in the newest effort by Nicolas Winding Refn, precisely for these reasons. They expected the film to be concerned with particular themes and issues. And at first glance, it seems like that might be the case, only it never chases those leads to their conclusion. This has lead many to disparage the film for its apparent lack of content. For me, though, the film is nothing but content. It is about the gulf that separates internal and external selves, the chasm that divides Julian’s blank, paralyzed face and the torrents that clearly run through him as he struggles with avenging his brother’s death. It is about violence in it’s purest form, as something we are confronted with, assaulted by, that we deal with visually as much as through touch. Violence is a thing imagined, that is trapped inside your brain, an event that you repeat a thousand and one times, when its reality is far shorter than we ever recall. One punch thrown, one bullet fired, one limb lost, one face bruised – it is all over so quickly, and yet the specular violence of it lives in a whirlwind in our brain, possessing our thoughts, provoking our fears. If Only God Forgives can be reasonably compared to Lynch, it is because that internal maelstrom is one that so closely resembles Lynch’s nightmarish dreamscapes.
But that is all really to say that I find the film far from empty.
It might seem from this essay that I think the criticism of emptiness is always in error, but that’s not quite true. I’d rather say I’m perpetually suspicious of it, especially when it is accompanied by an indication of the presence of style. I tend to wonder why the filmmakers worked so hard to accomplish something without content. They certainly thought they were saying something. But then there are the other films, you know, the ones we all agree aren’t any good. What about them? Is there anything there?
I can’t think anything but yes. Making any kind of art is a productive process – something is always added to the world. In a simply physical, tautological sense, there is always a there there. You may think it is no good, I may think it is no good, we may all think it was a waste of time to see, but its not nothing. It exists, if nothing else, in its very enunciation, and it speaks to its own production. It may speak poorly, or with a bad accent, but it speaks nevertheless. It is legitimate to hate something, to feel that it wasted your time, but for it to have done so it must exist, it must have form, and it must have content. Otherwise what is there to critique?
-Ben Creech
PS. I would be very interested in doing much more research on this topic, to see how this criticism has appeared through the ages, how many times it has been revised canonically, and how many times it has disappeared into obscurity. Naturally, the moments when the criticism of emptiness is most egregious are the only ones we ever notice – the ones for which they are ostensibly spot one would naturally disappear from sight. But this is a blog for casual essays, and so I won’t go quite that deep just yet.
Thanks for reading, post your comments down below. I’m hoping for fisticuffs.
Cinema and Other Impossible Pursuits 
Interesting post!
Usually, when I say ‘There is no _there_ there”, what I mean is that I feel as if someone said, “Hey, look at this!” and then when I looked, they didn’t show me anything. Following your argument, I wouldn’t say that was style over substance, but it might well have been playing with a new way of creating meaning, without actually having _valuable_ meaning created. Sure, a film is always creating something…but is it always creating meaning? Is it possible that what people are really criticizing is not the _lack_of substance, but rather that the substance, while present, isn’t of value (at least to them)?
I haven’t seen the film, so I cannot speak on it specifically, but that is my sense of the meaning of that particular criticism.
I think so, Rick. But this is precisely the linguistic bone I mean to pick. When we decry a film for being empty, or substance-less, what we mean is that it the film’s substance was of no value to me. The difference is not just the subjectivity of the critic we tend to take implicitly after their name appears at the top (or bottom) of their piece; rather it is a complete reversal of the issues at stake with the work being discussed. It becomes a diversion, a conversation stopper. It is a rejection of the work entirely, a suppression, not a consideration. It refuses the very existence of the work.
I dig your example quite a bit. That is precisely the kind of situation that provokes a critical response like this. The value we place and find in meaning is clearly as subjective as the root of that word (a possessive “mein-ing”), and I think it has to do with what value we place in what is there, but the issue I take with this storied criticism is that it insists on absence in the place of faulty presence.
This is a neat suraymm. Thanks for sharing!
First of all, I agree with you that the critique of a film being all style are ridiculous, so much so that I doubt they are really believed by those who make them. I think perhaps it is a convenience to say that instead of saying that there was too much about the subjective experience of that film to put into words in a review; it’s shorthand for “you probably won’t like this” or “this isn’t the kind of film that can easily be explained, and as such I can make no promises as to your liking of it.” I think in many other cases it could be an easy phrase for “I didn’t enjoy that movie and couldn’t tell you why or don’t want to be interrogated as to why.” Such might be my response to L’avventura if not to Malick.
I wonder the extent to which such criticisms are also grounded (at least in part) in a conviction on behalf of the individual viewer that such and such a director has not taken enough moral responsibility for the images s/he has put on the screen. I think it’s possible as a viewer to encounter a violent film and feel dismayed that its substance was lacking not because the film didn’t have any point, but because the point didn’t make itself apparent enough to the subjective viewer in time to protect against the violence that those images can do to him/her. As a viewer, I might take issue with the idea that I’m supposed to subject myself to a violent film just because it has a point that is hidden to me but available to others. And it might be easier for me to say that it had more style than substance if what I felt while watching it was painful grasping at straws for a way to understand the film in front of me that may be too much (too violent, too spiritual, too beautiful, too weird, too haunting) for me to take. Perhaps one reason the critique of style over substance is so persistent is because images do things to us we can’t comprehend otherwise, and those things can often make us extremely uncomfortable when talking to others about them. (I also think this is similar to people who attack post-tonal music for all the same reasons.)
As someone who adores David Lynch, I’m coming to think that Ebert’s review of Blue Velvet is an important critique to remember for all violent films: are the images of violence in this film substantiated by enough to make it worth it for me to sit through a film, masterpiece as it is. I, for one, think Blue Velvet is brilliant for all sorts of reasons, but I never find myself recommending it to others. In fact, it is often when I foresee that someone will think a film shows style over substance that I’m hesitant in showing it to them, in part because I know that the reactions to those films tend to be more subjective and precious for each viewer. I really liked Ian Gray’s essay on violence and subjective viewership (provoked by Only God Forgives) on RogerEbert.com and it’s been causing me to think a lot about my own film tastes and discomfort with images and types of violence.
Also, if you haven’t, you should take a look at W.J.T. Mitchell’s “What do Pictures Want?” I think what you say about the persistence of violent images on us is very much in line with some things he says.
Thanks again, Stuart, for the comments. I’ll try to address them in order.
I think I could agree that its a convenience, and even a shortcut to more complicated feelings about a piece. I can also understand the desire to not talk about why you didn’t like a particular film, and as you say don’t want to be interrogated over it. Where I stumble is in the role of the critic – whose task it is to articulate his/her feelings about a film, not skirt them. This method doesn’t address the things thy didn’t like, it simply waves on traffic: “Move along, nothing to see here.” The response you describe is valid, and I’ve seen critics write things similar to what you have written here, but that on its own is already an improvement, because it confronts the film through your subjectivity, clearly and honestly.
Now moral responsibility is another thing. That’s quite complicated. It becomes especially complicated with the usage of violence in particular (does it really address anything else? Sexuality, perhaps.) I’ve heard some criticisms within this ballpark as well, as if the filmmakers did not earn their stylistic gestures. The thing about preparing the viewer for the violence is something I can’t answer to, really. I loved Ian Gray’s essay, but I loved it especially because it spoke to something that I recognize as wholly true and real, and yet also wholly foreign to me. There are traumatic things I encounter in the cinema, things I avoid (Noe is on my list, as is Haneke), but violence on screen doesn’t affect me the way it might someone who has been the victim of some violent abuse/trauma. On the one hand, I stand by the artist; on the other I see the plight of the spectator.
I also steer clear of recommending a number of “traumatizing” titles, but I don’t think I do so simply because of the violence in the image, so much as the viewer’s taste. I’ve also recommended them a number of times (Tarr comes to mind – Werckmeister messed me up and then I turned around and started recommending it to specific individuals who needed it). What I don’t see is how to draw a line where the value of a film, or the pain one must endure, is really measurable. It’s such a private and personal thing, that its hard to determine. I likely won’t be recommending Only God Forgives to too many people, but all the same, I will to a few.
I guess, at the end of the day, this point you bring up about concern for the spectator is one I understand, but can’t evaluate. It’ll be a long time before I see Amour, sure, but I can’t criticize a work (in a general sense) for not being mindful of the spectators that may encounter it. So-called “dangerous” art might be worth calling out, but that’s a different discussion.
I should also add that I’ve not seen Only God Forgives either. Drive was one of my top 5 of that year (along with Tree of Life, Melancholia, and The Skin I Live In, all of which might fall under this style/substance critique) and many of these thoughts first came to me when I was trying to decide whether or not I wanted to go see Only God Forgives. After reading reviews of it I decided that I would probably not see it, not because it was too stylish without content, but because I did not think I would handle the content of that style well. There have been other times I’ve made similar decisions before seeing a film (Antichrist, Salo, and The Piano Teacher come to mind for films I’ve seen, Irreversible for films I still haven’t and probably won’t), and in all cases I waited a long time to learn what the film was trying to say through its violence before subjecting myself to it so that I would not feel overwhelmed by the film’s images without having the thematic or emotional context to comfortably put those images in for the sake of my own well-being.
This is a great point you are bringing up here, Ben, because in a lot of ways, I think, the stink of misplaced criticism unfairly latching itself onto Only God Forgives represents one of the most obvious instances of intelligent and supposedly seasoned critics whipping out their special balancing stick purely when it comes to reviewing genre, or “B-grade,” films, yet no one calls foul on this practice. Reviews for OGF seem to be damning it like a chef might damn a dessert for being too sweet, or a wine for being too dry, before throwing it out. Every component in the recipe must be in equal measure, or else it’s not a proper dish right? “Only God forgives has too much of this ingredient, therefore it is empty, pointless. A non-film.” Wrong. Substance is really code for a streamlined brand of characters or narrative which pass the test of the balancing stick. Nevermind if this lacking “substance” is not the point of the film in question, nor the key to recognizing its function or purpose. Instead of saying “style over substance,” I think they should be more honest and say “style and substance over a very limited idea of substance.” They’re looking in the wrong places.
[…] dissipates. One example of this might be the topic I explored in my last piece, the debate about style and substance – we simply repeat the expression, unaware that it fails to capture both our thoughts and the […]
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