“Style over substance” is one of cinema’s laziest insults. It assumes that style is decoration, that substance is depth, that the two can be peeled apart like shell and kernel. But cinema is not literature in disguise. It is an art of surfaces: light, rhythm, color, sound, the textures that move us before plot or moral argument ever arrives. To dismiss style is to dismiss cinema’s native tongue.
Four contemporary filmmakers embody this tension in different registers: Quentin Tarantino, Luca Guadagnino, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Joel & Ethan Coen. Each has been accused of privileging surfaces, but each demonstrates that style is never neutral. It is philosophy, affect, world-view.
Quentin Tarantino: Irony and Quotation
Tarantino’s cinema is a hall of mirrors. Every frame refers to another film, another genre, another cultural scrap: spaghetti westerns, grindhouse pulp, Hong Kong action, French New Wave. His detractors see theft and emptiness; his admirers see cinephilia elevated to philosophy.
The basement tavern scene in Inglourious Basterds shows how style functions as substance. For nearly twenty minutes, gestures and glances accumulate tension until violence erupts. The scene is not history but performance: war reimagined through genre tropes, dialogue as duel, cinema as masquerade. Tarantino’s stylization distances us, making us conscious of the artifice, of history as something we watch through film.
His style is ironic, critical, self-aware. Meaning is not under the surface — it is the surface.
Luca Guadagnino: Sensation and Immersion
Where Tarantino estranges, Guadagnino seduces. His cinema is tactile, painterly, drenched in sunlight and fabric. Narrative matters less than atmosphere; plot is secondary to sensation.
The peach scene in Call Me by Your Name becomes iconic not because of dialogue but because of light, stillness, vulnerability. Or in I Am Love, Emma’s taste of shrimp is filmed as erotic revelation: close-up, orchestral swell, the sensation of flavor as awakening. Guadagnino uses style not to distance but to immerse, to make us inhabit desire and longing through sensorial detail.
His style is empathetic. It transforms surface into intimacy.
Nicolas Winding Refn: Fetish and Excess
Refn occupies a different register. Films like Drive (2011), Only God Forgives (2013), and The Neon Demon (2016) are drenched in neon light, fetishized violence, and operatic slowness. Narrative is stripped to archetype, psychology to gesture.
Take Drive: Ryan Gosling’s Driver is less a character than a stylized icon — jacket, gloves, silence, bursts of violence. The substance is not in psychology but in fetish: the sheen of cars, the pulse of synth music, the ritual of violence as aesthetic spectacle. In The Neon Demon, fashion photography becomes horror, surfaces become terror, beauty becomes cannibalism.
Refn’s style is pure surface — but surface as obsession. His cinema argues, provocatively, that in a culture of images, fetish is substance.
The Coen Brothers: Irony and Fate
The Coens complicate the binary further. Their style is meticulous: symmetrical compositions, sardonic dialogue, tonal whiplash between comedy and tragedy. Critics sometimes call their films cold, too clever, more crafted than felt.
But the Coens use style as moral vision. In No Country for Old Men (2007), the long silences, the still landscapes, the precise framing create a sense of inevitability — fate as aesthetic. In The Big Lebowski (1998), parody and absurdity become philosophy: style as the recognition that life is chaos, pattern imposed only after the fact.
Their surfaces are controlled to the point of obsession, but beneath the wit lies metaphysics: the absurdity of existence, the indifference of the universe, the resilience (or foolishness) of human beings.
Four Dialects of Style
These four filmmakers show that style is not accessory but ontology.
- Tarantino: Style as irony — cinema reflecting on its own artifice.
- Guadagnino: Style as immersion — surface as emotional membrane.
- Refn: Style as fetish — surface as obsession, violence as aesthetic.
- Coens: Style as fatalism — surface as cosmic joke, fate delivered in precise framing.
Each demonstrates that what we call “style” is not superficial but philosophical.
Why the Accusation Persists
The anxiety about style stems from cultural hierarchies. Substance implies narrative, psychology, morality; style implies ornament, luxury, frivolity. Yet cinema resists this division. Its substance is style: the way a face is lit, a cut delayed, a silence stretched.
Tarantino, Guadagnino, Refn, and the Coens show that surfaces can critique, seduce, fetishize, or fatalistically mock. Their films are proof that style is not the enemy of meaning but its vehicle.
Conclusion: Surfaces That Think
Cinema is not a vessel into which “substance” is poured. It is surfaces that think — ironized, eroticized, fetishized, or fatalistic. Tarantino makes us aware of cinema as myth; Guadagnino makes us feel desire as atmosphere; Refn turns obsession into aesthetic; the Coens render cosmic indifference as meticulous style.
To dismiss them as “style over substance” is to miss the point. In their films, style is the argument: the lens through which meaning, memory, and desire come into focus. And perhaps in the 21st century, when we live in a world saturated with images, there is no deeper substance than the surface itself.
My World of Interiors 