Minor spoilers for Paddington in Peru

 

 

I love Paul King’s Paddington film trilogy; it’s like the modern Godfather—debate over whether the first or second are the best, with a general consensus that the third doesn’t live up to its predecessors. Except Paddington doesn’t feature Marlon Brando incoherently mumbling about nothing, so it might actually be better. Paddington 2 perhaps accomplishes what Wes Anderson has spent his whole career trying to achieve better than the man himself ever has. The composition of every shot looks like it could have been pulled from Anderson’s films though, though where his films can be stylish but cold, Paddington 2 is gorgeous and heartwarming. In fact, the Paddington trilogy might be the best thing ever done by humans, with sliced bread and the wheel coming in a somewhat respectable second and third.

 

 

Paddington in Peru, released in British theatres this week, opens with the loveable little bear receiving a beautiful new blue passport to enable his travel back to his home country to visit his Aunt Lucy. Typical bear and marmalade related shenanigans ensue from there, but the producers of the film needed a passport for Paddington to use. The story here gets somewhat murky: the producers say they asked the Home Office for a replica passport to use and were issued an official one in response. The Home Office has said this didn’t happen, but the story ran as if it did and people’s responses began to pour in.

 

 

Obviously pulling quotes from random people on Twitter and using them as examples of opinions is easy, meaningless, and you can cherry pick an opinion from any point along the political spectrum. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to do it, because it is fun. “Pay attention parents,” writes one cryptocurrency enthusiast, “This is how they will further groom your children into their woke Marxist ideology.” I, for one, loved the scene where Paddington, in his little red hat, stood up and proclaimed: “Our enemy, and the enemy of all Latin America, is the monopolistic government of the United States of America!” Don’t you remember it?

 

 

Legacy publications, though, have also weighed in on the matter. Most people—or most people who have touched grass in the last decade—see this for what it is: just something a little bit fun and cute. But this move, and the release of the film in general, has drawn the ire of Spectator columnist and TV writer Gareth Roberts, who has attacked Paddington in Peru and those who enjoy it in two separate articles.  , which you are free to interpret in any way you see fit. He wrote a few Doctor Who episodes (which, if my childhood memory serves me correctly, were actually not bad) and now spends his time writing anti-trans tweets and whinging in the Spectator about whatever is on his mind. This usually involves how we’re all ruled by the woke liberal elite or how trigger warnings will destroy society or how brilliant Elon Musk is. All pretty eye-rolling stuff that you’ll have seen countless times before from a particular genre of disgruntled man in the right-wing press.

 

 

Roberts bemoans Paddington’s status as a cultural icon, calling him “cold and dead-eyed”. I think anyone who can’t enjoy Paddington must be, on some level, spiritually bereft, but that’s his taste. Finding Paddington sweet is finding the ones and zeros of code cute: he’s not a ‘real bear’. Obviously, genius. Have you ever met one of those people who smugly proclaim that love is actually just a chemical reaction or a sunset is just photons hitting your retina, and that’s all there is to them? Willfully (or stupidly) missing the point that the scientific construction of an object and the experience, the qualia, that humans feel experiencing it are completely different things. Have a heart. Paddington is cute.

 

 

The tweeness of Paddington, Roberts contends, is like sex: “appalling in public, and you should be sent to prison if you force it on people who don’t consent.” A simile as clumsy as it is distasteful. Paddington, as Roberts views it, is not merely a cute British icon, but a way for the “simple of mind and thought” to contend with complex immigration issues. To Roberts, the ‘nice’ centrist middle class are clapping like seals at their views being confirmed by what is, ostensibly, children’s entertainment. I mean, it would be as stupid as writing a story about an alien with two hearts who arrives from a war-torn home in a small vessel (albeit bigger on the inside) that was welcomed in by a variety of British families, often finding it difficult to adjust to cultural differences. Who would watch that twee shit?

 

 

Roberts finds it infuriating that the home office would dare to take time to do something like that in such a trying time in Britain. But current Labour is constantly accused of being neoliberal ghouls with no humanity behind the eyes (to be fair, not totally untrue). Roberts himself wrote a piece lamenting Keir Starmer’s air of ‘seriousness’, something he sees as a façade to present himself as more ‘adult’. However, he gripes equally when they take a minute out of their day to do something nice. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t. It cannot have taken longer to issue Paddington a passport than it takes to make a cup of coffee or go to the toilet. And it almost certainly was done by some intern that wouldn’t have been doing anything that important anyway. It’s not like Yvette Cooper took his passport photo.

 

 

Roberts assumes that Paddington has been issued a passport as part of some grand political gesture, intending to promote open borders and probably undermine British culture. After all, he is an illegal immigrant who arrived on a small boat, received free accommodation in an eye-wateringly expensive part of London, ended up in prison, and after all that still was welcomed with citizenship! As he sees it, children’s entertainment should stay just that. There’s merit to this sentiment in general, people are refusing to move on to any kind of challenging adult media is something of an epidemic nowadays. But has it not crossed Roberts’ mind that this may have been done with children in mind? That children know what a passport is? He whines about a perceived ‘Americanisation’ of this aggressive statement of values rather than British complexity and subtlety (or something like that), yet here he is writing two articles seething about Paddington Bear. Grow up. If Paddington had included a transgender character, his brain (or whatever fleshy matter sits in its place) would’ve probably melted out his ears with rage. ∎

 

 

Words by Albert Genower. Image Courtesy of Paul Hudson via Flickr.