Paddington Bear is a double adoptee, as the opening of Paddington 2 (2017) establishes. Washed away from his biological parents during a presumably fatal torrent in his native “Darkest Peru,” the cub is rescued by an older pair of bears whom Paddington grows up referring to as his aunt and uncle. Aunt Lucy and Uncle Pastuzo are unique for dreaming of relocating from South America to the metropolis of London after building up a local marmalade-production industry. When an earthquake destroys the new family’s intricate system of tree dwellings, killing Uncle Pastuzo, Aunt Lucy determines that young Paddington should embark for England on his own. Lucy herself stays behind in a “home for retired bears,” in Paddington’s euphemism. This trauma sets the young bear in motion as both movies follow the nursing of his wounds in London.

Paddington’s positive bond with maternal figures buoys him along in his quest for the greater motherland of the United Kingdom, which has as much to do with paternalism
and the law as it does with attachment and nourishment, or lack thereof. The first Brit who speaks to Paddington upon his arrival to bustling London is the effervescent Mrs Brown, played by Sally Hawkins. It is Mrs Brown who prods her anxious husband into allowing the refugee to stay with them in Windsor Gardens while he seeks a more “permanent home.” Unlike his adoptive family in Paddington’s own country, the Browns are neither barren nor yearning: they are occupied with raising two children of their own. Paddington is a perplexing supplement to the enclosed unit.

The first movie adaptation of Michael Bond’s classic childrens’ book, Paddington (2015, directed by Paul King), launches the bear as stowaway cargo into London. Its dramatic motor is the question of whether the Brown family will accept him as an additional dependent. Paddington is ultimately a saga of the bear attempting to prove he has sufficient vigour and optimism to be a familial boon. In Paddington 2 (2017, King), the bear has been invited to stay, but as his resident status starts to take on more importance than his species, the burden of proof becomes greater. While he faces criminal charges and imprisonment, a query arises into the extent of the Browns’s faith in Paddington’s lawful intentions, and the family’s sense for justice at large. Both inquests resolve triumphantly. The movies strive to reify the nation against spectres of harm associated with refugees, and in doing so, showcase the fragile choreographies of liberal democracy.

Paddington’s foreignness manifests foremost as a festive way of eating and working that transports those around him to delight and fury, while bringing himself many gaffes and accidental destructions. However, each time, his intentions are shown to complement the spirit of the city. Pursuing thieves and doggedly labouring to save up for purchases, Paddington is a vigilant denizen who aspires toward the democratically ideal balance of self-reliance and accord with authority. Allusions are made throughout to relate the bear’s status to that of Jews who fled the Holocaust – who, according to Aunt Lucy as well as the second-hand toy merchant Mr Gruber, were welcomed to seek safety and employment in their new city. A feeling of vicarious gratitude on behalf of Paddington, Mr Gruber, and other societal misfits suffuses the films. The message is that benevolent law, via the bustle of the capital, conjoins its variegated subjects into joyful and productive families. The political dichotomy of “friend versus enemy” melds with the moral axis of “good versus evil,” as it becomes tantamount to tie Paddington’s accord with the law to favourable judgement of his character. This stance is developed simultaneously on empiricist and rationalist fronts.

Mr Brown, an insurance broker, runs statistical assessments of risk. In the sequence where Paddington initially enters the Brown residence, father Brown draws up a series of calculations that impel him to phone his own broker and add protection against bears to the family’s coverage. His request causes a bureaucratic freeze-up against which he insists on the legitimacy of “bear” as a category for liability. Thus Paddington’s stigma starts to be incorporated into Windsor Gardens, as a means not just of addressing the father’s anxiety around material loss, but also in order to constitute the foreigner into their governable world. Mr Brown’s administrative intervention serves as corollary to modern law, making diversity profitable by forming increasingly specific figures tied to a collective sense of risk. Right before the crucial moment of confirming the insurance programme, Paddington flushes a toy down  the toilet, which breaks the basin and floods the bathroom, sending himself crashing down the stairs in the tub. But a mechanism has already been referenced to accommodate the mishap, so the Browns’s forgiveness comes at no real cost. Or, more specifically, amelioration comes with a wink: if only Mr Brown had acted before the bear’s arrival to insure the home against more categories of strangers, his frantic episode could have been avoided. Instead, money will now have to be spent to repair the house damage. But Mr Brown will predict better next time. Meanwhile, by both policy and event, Paddington has become animate, an agent who can perform actions and receive judgement.

This allows for the judicial aspect. In both the first film and the sequel are chase scenes where Paddington falsely appears to passers-by to be fleeing a crime. A canny chain of falls and collisions makes the bear increasingly suspect in the eyes of the police. In Paddington 2, the actual culprit ignites a smoke bomb and disappears before the cops catch up. The astounded Paddington is detained and jailed. The remainder of the movie tells how Mrs Brown and her family find evidence that the real thief had indeed been present, believing that proof of the mystery criminal would exonerate Paddington of his charges and free him from prison. In her determination to prove Paddington’s rightful place is with the Browns, Mrs Brown’s actions are unrestrained by typical anxieties of punishment. Breaking into a suspect’s house in pursuit of alternate evidence, she demonstrates a belief in the legal system’s ability to self-correct in judging residents as good or bad (more so than “innocent” or “guilty”) on an empirical basis. When the trail slackens, inferences based on the bear’s character bolster her: “Paddington wouldn’t do such a thing,” she insists. As painstakingly represented by Mrs Brown, this immigrant could not possibly have ill intentions.

The films highlight Paddington’s propensity to feel guilty and become sad when rebuked, paired with his near-constant transgression of mores, of which he is only somewhat aware. Aligned with Deleuze’s description of modern law as outlining “a realm of transgression where one is already guilty, and where one oversteps the bounds without knowing what they are,” Paddington shows a pet-like preemptive and retroactive anxiety over his blunders. But crucially, unlike Deleuze’s masochist who subverts law by taking pleasure from punishment, Paddington addresses his anxiety by seeking repeated assurance that he is appreciated. Sitting in jail, he tearfully states, “even the Browns have forgotten me.” A few minutes later, in a fateful scramble, the family tells him over the phone, “We’d never forget you, Paddington!” coupled with the news that they have located the real thief. Paddington’s life energy is immediately renewed. Compare this with the recurrent trips and falls of protagonists in early-20th-century slapstick films. While the slapstick figure’s ever-frustrated effort toward a carefree, seamless stroll in the city is shown to be exhausting and self-eviscerating against a system of ominous vehicles and criminals, the 21st-century Paddington finds himself returning to an identity that is intact and affirmed, both by the rationalist scepticism of Mr Brown and the law, and by Mrs Brown’s world of sensorial evidence. When the Browns and Paddington together finally pin the blame on the proper criminal, the narrator states, “The police realised they made a terrible mistake.”

Mrs Brown might perhaps be read extra-diegetically as the mature version of another character played by Sally Hawkins: schoolteacher Poppy Cross from Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky (2008). Like Paddington, Poppy moves around London with a degree of levity and trust in strangers that comes across as blithe, often vexing. While Paddington sets out to illustrate a self-regulatory function between morally minded denizens and the law, Happy-Go-Lucky concerns itself with a sociological gap between attitude and upbringing. With patience and the aid of a social worker, Poppy is able to connect a student’s encounter with family abuse to his suddenly disruptive behaviour. Not so easy with her reactionary, conspiratorial driving instructor Scott, with whom Poppy spends an hour each week semi-jokingly quarrelling. She suspects Scott’s neuroses arise from trouble he may have faced as a child, but their therapeutic “progress” is slow and inconsistent. After Scott is discovered peeping on Poppy’s flat, an argument ensues, and their relationship sours at the threat of violence. For the first time, Poppy finds herself at an interpersonal limit. She walks away from Scott when his anger seems unresolvable. This moment of impasse, arisen from the confusion of Poppy’s perhaps misguided attempt to “reform” Scott, presents a counterpoint to the prolonged toils of Paddington and the Browns. Between the two films, one wonders whether it would be possible to choose to refrain, to allow uncertain impressions to remain multi-faceted or even ambivalent, to find the courage to direct anxious energies toward a more liveable scenario. 

The Paddington movies embrace an eerie predictability of contemporary responses to perceived threats from strangers, presenting a law that accordingly oscillates between whimsy and gravity.  In Windsor Gardens as well as in prison, Paddington’s own compulsion turns out to be the same as the Browns’s: to prove repeatedly that his intentions are worthy of London and benefit the state. In this sense, the bear’s blithe persona is shadowed by tremendous anxiety, since his residence in the city requires near-constant reassurance of his adherence to a democratic good. It is a delicate and challenging endeavour, easily upended, as the whirling plots of the movies demonstrate, by hesitation from other Londoners that morphs into disdain, and the recurrence of guilt on Paddington’s own behalf.  The system comprises mad dashes toward differentiating acceptable from punishable identities, a flurry without which the simple illegibility of outsiders would destroy core understandings. It is not evil itself that is feared here, but doubt. Paranoia rules Paddington’s London, where kindness toward strangers is shown to exist only in exception to the law.  Something amidst this flurry rings true to the conditions we find ourselves in as denizens, and makes the films oddly poignant. .