Bear Consideration

By E. Grant

Paddington Bear, basically national mascot, basically Queen Elizabeth, cog of the nostalgia machine, has just have been given a musical and is soon to be given a fourth movie and a television series. That’s, like, all the things. Amidst all the song and dance, the Home Office has joined the choir! And has officially given Paddington a passport. How very odd, when there were 224,000 asylum seekers waiting for a passport at the time. Not a critical word has been heard about this publicity stunt (nor about why the Home Office is essentially advertising StudioCanal). For Paddington Bear is now a corporate mascot with an aggressive PR campaign. Even as the polite bear hits the West End, StudioCanal is rather impolitely suing Spitting Image for making jest of him. A couple of RAF men were recently arrested and fined for defiling a public statue of Paddington. ‘Please look after this bear, he’s corporate property’, so to speak. 

Increasingly, the Paddington franchise has overtly connected the bear to contemporary immigration issues: he ran into immigration officers in the 2008 books; he was granted a passport in the latest Paddington 3; and ‘in the wake of Brexit and the Trump presidency, Paddington’s plight seems more urgent than ever’, Vox writes. Hence the Home Office can jump on the bandwagon and look haloed. The trouble is, I don't think Paddington is really an immigrant at all. 

Michael Bond, the original creator, was ‘confused’ at translations of his books into other languages because he thought ‘Paddington was essentially an English character’. Quite. Paddington may have come from the darkest depths of Peru, but he is English through and through. (Bond originally made Paddington from Africa until he was informed that it had no bears. ‘Peru’ is a proxy for ‘vague and far away’.) There is no cultural exchange to be had upon his arrival; the bear carries no cultural luggage; his ornamental suitcase might as well be empty. We are offered a fantasy of perfect assimilation, comprising complete deference to English values. He is easily adopted by a quintessentially English family, because he is already more English than the lot of them! ‘Paddington’ is a metonym for our capital city. Recall that Mrs Brown's acceptance of him is predicated on his politeness, in a parsimonious citizenship test: do you already eat marmalade and speak the Queen’s English?

Slapstick is the rule of plot in Paddington because his mistakes are always well-intentioned and solvable, creating episodic resolutions which do not compel an overall character arc (and so the franchise is indefinitely extendable). Paddington need never change or grow, kept in a protective Neverland. Hence StudioCanal can sue the shit out of Spitting Image, whose swearing, drug-hardened version of Paddington jeopardises that Neverland. Rather a producer bankrupted than an imaginary bear, a local deity, insulted.

And look, I think Paddington is awfully sweet with his hat and sandwiches and pleas to ‘please look after this bear’ and so on. But we don't all need to look after the blessed bear forever. I’m no skulking villain of a Paddington film, nor am I the supposed real-life villains at Spitting Image. Granted, the original series presents a truly kind and good-humoured vision of welcoming immigrants to our isle. In the very first chapter:

The bear puffed out its chest. "I'm a very rare sort of bear," he replied importantly. "There aren't many of us left where I come from."

"And where is that?" asked Mrs Brown.

The bear looked round carefully before replying. "Darkest Peru. I'm not really supposed to be here at all. I'm a stowaway!"

And so, Paddington is swept off to Notting Hill to join the multicultural milieu of postwar London, befriending the elderly Hungarian Mr Gruber. The fragility of refugees is alluded to, but swiftly remedied, in the idealised Britain of a children’s book, a Britain which unstintingly welcomes the lost and weary. Paddington’s mishaps and confusions align the process of assimilation with that of growing up – for Paddington is really a lost child, modelled off WWII evacuees and written for children who are, much like newcomers to the country, learning its ways.  

But again, this empathy is extended only to a foreign bear who is not meaningfully foreign any more than he is meaningfully a bear, an expatriate whose arrival produces no cultural exchange. All very well in a children’s book, but a touch facile from our Home Office. Since our government would be more likely to taxidermy Paddington than give him a house in Notting Hill, this collusion between the Home Office and StudioCanal – giving out passports to bears – is a bit of slapstick.

E. GRANT's memoir, Untitled: As Such, will be published in 2032. It is shortlisted for the A. E. Stallings Prize for stalling. 

Art by Alice Balfour