I showed my friend how to wrap her newborn securely onto her chest, and we ventured out on a slow walk around the block, her first trip outside the condo since returning from the hospital. There were blossoms on the trees and the sunlight was sweet. My friend seemed newly born herself. She looked at everything like she’d never seen any of it before. She moved like she’d just learned how to walk. We stopped in at a used bookshop for ten minutes, then headed slowly back home. She cried the whole time and shit her pants a little.

Again, we proceeded to the hospital. This time she was admitted at seven centimeters, and the bitchy midwife’s shift had ended, hurrah. The new midwife was a rad old battle-axe. The gymnast wanted to be in the tub, so into the tub she went, and stayed. She had zero body hair. I tried not to let this bother me, by which I mean, with apology, it bothered me. She was very far away, very far gone in her own rhythm, lost to the world. She was another person entirely, or no person. Having been an athlete, she had incredible focus: not once did she complain or whine. Not Why me, not I can’t, not It’s too hard, not Oh god no please no, none of the usual pleading, the usual begging for mercy. She didn’t seem to need anything. She was doing it all by herself. We kept the lights off. Outside, the sun was getting lower in the sky, and the room filled with a stunning orange glow. The midwife sat quietly in a rocking chair on the other side of the tub, and a nurse stood far back in the corner of the room, watchful and waiting. The husband sat right by the edge of the tub, pale and silent and choked up, holding both of her hands and trying not to cry. The midwife must have noticed some subtle change, because she reached into the water and felt the baby’s head and said You can push this baby out whenever you’re ready.

The nurse in the corner took this as her cue to turn on a portable lamp and shine it directly at the water so the midwife was able to see. The gymnast gave a mighty roar and delivered her baby into her own hands, then intuitively lifted him up out of the water onto her chest, where he looked calmly into her eyes and she into his. Face to face after having just met and known each other for all time.

While Leyner applied his talents elsewhere, literary history ground on. As Zadie Smith’s now-canonical argument goes, the standard-issue anglophone “lyrical realist” novel developed a severe case of neurosis in the years after September 11 and the endless war. As if it knew all too well that its neat model of the psyche could not hold, the lyrical realist novel started to filigree itself with an increasingly ornate tissue of preemptive self-critique, a simultaneous apology and excuse for its stultifying conventionality, its embarrassing fetish for authenticity. Smith saw an antidote to this neurotic realism in the “brutal excision of psychology” at work in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. No interiority; just neutral, surface-level sensations. (Recent novels by writers like Ottessa Moshfegh and Alexandra Kleeman clearly carry on a part of this affect-flattening project.) Two paths: on one, self-loathing neurosis; on the other, no feeling whatsoever. In such a literary field, one might wonder, where is the place for fun?

Bourgeois film: the phrase conjures a lost world of seething Communist weeklies, their back pages in thrall to the tidy metaphor of base and superstructure. But for much of cinema’s first century, “bourgeois film” was real enough: it could be said to exist because it had something to define itself against, an artistic and ideological challenger belonging to the bourgeoisie’s historical antagonist — proletkino, as the early Soviets called it. The working class, too, had its cinema. “Leaning on the trades unions, supported by state organs, closely linked to the party, Proletkino goes cheerfully to work” — so announced an editorial in the journal published by Proletkino, one of many film organizations launched in the early years of the Soviet Union. The group aspired to invent cinema by, for, and about the working class, supported by and expanding the institutions made in the proletariat’s name.

A series of objectives condenses in this vision. As the project of working-class cinema was transformed and went global in the subsequent decades, these objectives would only be realized in part, spawning a diversity of proletkino-aligned films that checked some of the founding vision’s boxes, but not others. In the 1920s and ’30s, Communist Party–backed films, rarely made by working-class artists themselves, pioneered formal breakthroughs, from Eisenstein’s montage to Renoir’s novelistic realism, as working-class institutional worlds developed in parallel: workers’ film clubs and agit-trains in the USSR, Popular Front film productions in France. The ’40s and ’50s saw the rise of Italian neorealism — stories of proletarian life, shot at street level in the open air and featuring nonprofessional actors, though largely operating independent of working-class institutions — which later inspired new film movements in India, the Philippines, Iran, and Brazil. And as the New Left became a global force, a Latin American film movement — Third Cinema — reinvigorated the bond between working-class political parties and working-class cinema, flourishing during Allende’s tenure in Chile and the first post-revolutionary decade in Cuba. Third Cinema’s influence also spread to every continent, and its novelty lay not just in its anti-imperial force, but in how it lent proletkino’s vision a new practice of cultural organizing. As the Argentine directors Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas explained, movement- and party-affiliated exhibitions doubled as “enlarged cell meetings,” with pauses and prompts for audience discussion built in, leading to the discovery of “a new facet of cinema: the participation of people who, until then, were considered spectators.”

The irony of working-class film flourishing at the end of history lends this new proletkino its distinct structure of feeling. Today’s working-class films have dwindled to the size of isolated protagonists, often women, trapped in small homes with families burdensome or disintegrating, their loneliness symbolized by “the shot of the solitary walker, alone in the crowd.” Politics, Bickerton points out, lies outside their scope, with protest “limited to individual acts of defiance, or criminality.” Happy endings are rare. Work is less a problem than its absence: unemployed, or soon to be, or loosely employed, characters wander through second-tier cities on the lookout for jobs, or sit in dimly lit rooms, sedated by drugs, the noise of the slums filtering through their windows. Panoramas of class war have narrowed to portraiture, claustrophobically drawn, relieved only by imprints of place: post-industrial landscapes and slums appear as backdrops, mere intimations of social context. Yet shining through in these films is a profound “moral charge,” Bickerton argues, one otherwise “entirely absent from today’s cinéma de qualité.” In them a world of experience typically neglected or sentimentalized instead finds expression.

[...] And in China a canny, Party-negotiated mix of state funding and foreign partnerships has propped up an industry likewise defined by its blockbusters. The Wandering Earth (2019) — “China’s first full-scale interstellar spectacular,” The Hollywood Reporter gushed — is exemplary: a feverishly action-filled, staggeringly high-grossing, relentlessly dull climate change allegory in which the United Earth Government abandons Earth and leaves a lone Chinese rescue unit, armed with a combustible bottle of Russian vodka smuggled into outer space, to stave off the planet’s destruction.

Aesthetically, these national cinemas tend toward Hollywood-style garbage; politically, they tend toward nationalism. They challenge US cultural dominance by lapping up its forms and diversify commercial cinema by flying different flags in the backgrounds of the same CGI-generated explosions. But their rise has opened up an alternative possibility: that a 21st-century cinema might describe a path divergent from Hollywood if not in opposition to it.

André Novais Oliveira’s Long Way Home (2018), their most quietly entrancing feature, tells the story of Juliana (Grace Passô, star of FP’s anti-star system), a woman who recently moved to Contagem for a job with the city’s anti-dengue unit. She knocks doors and inspects backyards for humid areas where mosquitoes might gather. She’s touchingly reticent; eventually, we learn that her husband, supposed to relocate with her soon after her move, has ghosted her, their marriage crumbling after a car accident ended her pregnancy. This appears to be the plot, but the pulse of the film is elsewhere: it is less an individual than a plural story, as Ivone Margulies has argued in Film Quarterly. The representative shot, rather than one of an individual alone in a crowd, is one of Juliana and her coworkers walking slowly down the middle of the street, the bright rolling hills of Belo Horizonte’s outskirts as backdrop. Juliana makes friends at work, opens up a bit. Her life stays suspended amid disorientation and late paychecks, but meanwhile it reaches a kind of ordinary half-happiness, a life lived in relation. Politics appears at a slant: through the racial lineage of old family photos in a stranger’s home, complaints of terrible pay, or a story of the suburb’s origin in forced relocations. In the feminist film journal Another Gaze, the curator Janaína Oliveira spoke of how Long Way Home wasn’t received in Brazil as Black cinema, since it doesn’t revolve around racism or social struggle. And yet “Temporada [the film’s Portuguese name] is Cinema Negro, man!” In the same way, it’s working-class cinema. Here is a film made possible by the Workers’ Party that devotes less attention to class war than to the banal rhythms of working-class community, crafting a proletkino of everyday Black life, modest and unspectacular, beyond romance or bleakness. Its politics enter here, through a cultural vision that values working-class life at its most quotidian.

Last thing first: your attack on the “Contemporary Themed Review” was really an attack on doing culture war disguised as literary criticism. I agree that doing culture war is predictable and boring, so I try not to do it. In defense of my colleagues, at least of the critics who do mostly literary stuff, it seems to me that reviews of fiction, author biographies, and other literary miscellanea (I’ll leave out the poets, who can speak for themselves) are one media zone that hasn’t been thoroughly colonized by culture war arguments. I think it’s because we critics are interested in other things, like stories and how they’re put together, which is also known as form, plus language, which sometimes rises to the level of style. (Personally I just love analyzing that kind of shit.) Sure, there are pieces around that ask questions like “Should we cancel James Gould Cozzens?” and proffer the answer: “Maybe not entirely!” (Actually, Cozzens was canceled long ago by Dwight Macdonald on entirely other grounds, namely being a lousy writer of pure kitsch — ha ha ha, great piece, Dwight!) But even the New Yorker has seemed to tire of running such pieces in the past year. Still, you do get a lot of short stories in that magazine that are more or less allegories for cancel culture. Some of them are funny! Oh well.

More troubling to me is your sympathy for the “Contemporary Reader,” who gets confused reading Goodreads, Twitter, and the Times Book Review. If this guy can’t keep up, fuck him. Let him read Sally Rooney, or whichever novelist the hype barnacles attach themselves to next. Critics need not internalize the mentality of literary consumerism. It’s reasonable for publishers and authors to worry about who reads what and why and how many of those readers (the saints! Spending their money on books!) there are, but as you point out, book reviewers don’t get paid very much. And here is the thing we buy with our penury: total indifference to the wider literary marketplace. We write our pieces, we have our say, we don’t care what you strangers are reading.