It’s sad, but true: saying “I hate Valentine’s Day” has lost all of its punch.
Now, the Internet has given every 13-year-old edge lord with a keyboard and a mailbox void of love letters the opportunity and self-awareness to vent their disillusionment with the holiday. No longer will you be thought of as a Snapchat-age Socrates just because you decry the transformation of an obscure saint’s memorial into a Valentine Vegas of commercialized romance — in fact, people will probably think you’re kind of a jerk.
Never one to be put down by an oversaturation of hot takes, though, I’ve succinctly swapped gears to espouse my thoughts on the second-most degenerate, capitalist-bootlicking feature of this particular Feb. 14: Paddington Bear.
While his latest outing, “Paddington in Peru,” hits theaters this Friday, the celebrated British furball has existed in some form or another since 1956 when BBC cameraman Michael Bond bought a small toy bear who’d been abandoned on a shelf, according to Paddington’s official site. Named after the Underground station near Bond’s home, the bear inspired the first of many bestselling books, “A Bear Called Paddington,” written by William Collins and illustrated by Peggy Fortnum, in 1958.
Paddington would go on to become a veritable British Mickey Mouse, with his shaggy brown fur, blue duffle coat and crumpled red hat becoming the inspiration for stuffed animals, rock groups, race horses and, most recently, a series of feature films produced by StudioCanal.
And just like Disney’s hollow-eyed mascot, it gives me little pleasure to say that Paddington Bear has become an equally twisted reflection of everything he supposedly represents.
The ethos of the bear’s first two films, directed by Paul King, is largely that all of the nastiness that we seem to encounter nowadays can be muddled through with unquestioning optimism and a little bit of polite firmness — speak softly and carry a big hat, if you will.
In this way, the “Paddington” films, as well as King’s recent “Wonka,” are often treated as a great refutation of the commercial, apathetic standard of 21st-century cinema.
I still haven’t forgotten the scenes in 2022’s “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” where Nic Cage’s skeptical self-insert character is converted into ardent belief after being told by multiple characters that “Paddington 2” is the greatest, most beautiful film of all time. Likewise, Rotten Tomatoes lists the second film as the third greatest in a list of the 150 best feel-good movies of all time, and the film’s score on the website made headlines when put into competition with “Citizen Kane,” a slightly-more-serious film also deemed close to perfect.
In reality, though, the two films, 2014 and 2017 releases, respectively, could not be more a product of their environment than if they had fallen from the sky into a cutesy little bear-shaped cookie cutter.
Where the past decade of popular cinema has drawn rightful criticism for its shameless reliance on apathetic comedies and movies about costumed heroes, each more alienated from artistic meaning than the last, the “Paddington” films sneak right through those same criticisms. Instead, they dope us up with hollow optimism and rose-tint our perceptions of the world for the sake of easy smiles and that sky-high Tomatometer score.
This is why “Paddington” insists on so prominently displaying the bear’s cuddlesome capacity to bring people together — even a family wrested apart by Big Modern Issues like the technological divide, job dissatisfaction and adolescent loneliness.
It’s the same reason why the same easily-grasped themes about mending relationships and self-growth that have pervaded almost every major Pixar release since the ‘90s have morphed into a storytelling jackhammer that films like “Inside Out 2” rattle into our skull until we’ve no choice but to accept their arguments at face value. Now, if a film like “Paddington” does not succeed in planting the seeds in our minds for half a dozen cutesy Pinterest posts and an inspirational Instagram story, then it’s not done its job.
The past several decades of popular culture have successfully convinced us that we are sadder and more desperately in need of reassurance than ever. There’s some truth to the statement, too; the division of audiences into small markets, each with narrower interests and lower standards than the last, has allowed producers to skirt by with bare-minimum standards and deepened our appetite for art that at least appears to care more about real people than eye-glazing spectacle.
Take just the offerings in theaters this month: “Heart Eyes,” a “Scream” riff that practically wears its laziness on its boring, light-up murder mask, can get away with its unoriginality because that’s all that its core audience of horror fans has been conditioned to expect. And I shouldn’t have to tell you that “Captain America: Brave New World”’s plague of hurried reshoots and poor early reception will make little difference to those already sunk neck-deep in the obligatory bog of Marvel content.
In reality, “Paddington” is no nobler than any of its contemporaries. The film is not some miraculous antidote to the catered apathy of the modern multiplex, but a well-disguised extension of it. Its obnoxious cheeriness and allergy to complex thought is not an accidental byproduct of making a lovely little film, but rather the exact concept being sold; there is nothing benevolent about being so starved of meaning that we require a market-approved, twee little ursine munchkin with a marmalade dependency to regurgitate it back to us.
It’s true that the Internet is the death of all sincerity — here I am on it now, attacking a creature whose only crime of note is probably saying “thank you” one too many times — but the collective effort to co-opt and magnify this obscure icon of British culture into anything more than a stuffed bear on a shelf is an insult to the character and to the real-life issues he’s been stretched to address.
The “Paddington” films can certainly be enjoyed in their own right, but it’s also worth recognizing them for what they are: a clever, well-tailored product leeching off of the sad state of our entertainment industry. And I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to be consuming any product to curb the emptiness of my soul this Friday, I’d rather it be a box of heart-shaped Oreos than some saccharine Smokey Bear wannabe.
Kevin Lynch can be reached at lync1832@stthomas.edu.
