Paddington and the Idiot
“Paddington looks in the good in all of us and somehow he finds it.”
I’m trying out a new segment on the website where I take two pieces of art, one traditionally considered high culture and the other pop culture, and looking at how they investigate similar themes and use similar techniques. My goal isn’t so much to break down all the walls of snobbery, but to invite everyone into the walls. Many of the things we consider to be old, stuffy high culture were once, in some sense, “pop culture” or outsider culture, and at least part of “pop culture” will at some point be old and stuffy. As someone who has tried to write fiction, I know how much work and thought goes into every word, so I want to better appreciate the details, themes, methods, and impact of both the new and the old. If you like this format let me know, and if not also let me know!
Paddington 2, for a long time, had the highest rating of any movie in Rotten Tomatoes history. A movie about the wacky adventures of a talking bear was the most positively viewed movie of all time. I refused to believe it. There was no way Paddington 2 could be that good. I vaguely remembered seeing commercials for Paddington when I still watched live TV, and Paddington seemed terrible. For starters, it was a live action movie with an animated animal. Those movies are pretty uniformly bad (Alvin and the Chipmunks, Marmaduke, Garfield). Second, it was all wacky slapstick and gross kid humor; Paddington was cleaning his ears with toothbrushes and flooding the bathroom. Third, it's a kids movie and they’re also generally not very good. So with the deepest skepticism possible, I fired up Paddington on my laptop alone in my tiny room of an apartment. The next ninety minutes were amazing. And somehow, Paddington 2 was even better. For some reason, it’s only at 97% of Rotten Tomatoes right now, but it deserves each and every one of those hundred percent.
With the zeal of a convert, I became an apostle for Paddington. I made my family watch it. I made my extended family watch it. I watched it with my family friends. Early on in my relationship I made my now fiance watch it. And everyone approached the movie the same skepticism that I brought to it, but Paddington never disappointed, because Paddington the Bear is the hero we need. He is kind and polite and everything works out right in the end.
Paddington is what Fyodor Dostoevsky wanted to achieve when writing the Idiot. He wanted to “depict a completely beautiful human being,” and see how the society of Saint Petersburg would react to this pure Christian soul in their midst. And it comes across in the novel that he didn’t know how the characters would respond to this beautiful person, Prince Lev Nikiolovitch Myshkin, an innocent man newly arrived in the capital city of Petersburg. Most characters take the Prince to be an Idiot because of his naivete and truthfulness. He goodness means he cannot follow the corrupt rules of society, but many people assume he is just too simple to understand them.
Based on Dostoevsky’s theology, I would guess that he thought the prince would have a transformative effect on society, that he would be killed, or both. As Plato writes in the Republic and is born out in the life of Christ, “They will tell you that the just man who is thought unjust will be scourged, racked, bound—will have his eyes burnt out; and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled.” Prince Myshkin however, gets caught up in and trapped in the swamp of Petersburg which lies hidden beneath a glimmering facade. In Book I, it seems like the Prince could indeed have a transformative influence on st. Petersburg. After being initially rebuffed, the Prince is invited into the house of General Iván Fyódorovich Epanchín, his wife, and three daughters. The Prince’s stories of near execution and the good his is able to do for an outcast woman when he was living in France completely change their opinion of the Prince from an idiot to, in the case of the youngest daughter Aglaya, an idealist and chivalrous knight. However, when Nastasya Filippovna enters the story, it seems to derail any transformative effect that the Prince may have. The Prince sees her heart under her cynical and shamed exterior, and Nastasya sees the purity that leads to the Princes naivete. But she thinks that she can never be worth of the Prince and so she cycles between love of Myshkin and Rogozhin, the dark, carnal reflection of Myshkin’s compassionate love. Being caught between the love of Myshkin and Rogozhin eventually leads to Nastasya’s death at Rogozhin’s hands, and the Prince is driven mad in the aftermath.
Paddington, is that beautiful person, but unlike Myshkin, his presence, compassion, and boundless love truly does transform the society joins. The beginning Paddington's journey is devastating. He arrives as a refugee in London after a massive earthquake destroyed his home and kills his uncle. And when he gets to Paddington station, no one will take him in. But undeterred in his compassion, he still takes time to feed the pigeons. Eventually, Paddington is taken in by the Brown family, and one by one he brings them around to having a bear live with them. When Paddington 2 begins we see the whole street utterly changed by Paddington's love. And when he goes to prison (it's a wild movie!), his goodness alone is enough to change even the most hardened criminals for the better. In no time at all, the prison becomes essentially the set of the Great British Baking Show but with bed time stories.
Paddington succeeds where the Idiot fails. While the Prince being trapped by the machinations of Petersburg may be a more realistic take on what would happen to such an innocent person, it doesn’t prove the point Dostoevsky was trying to convey. A person with a truly beautiful soul will resurrect the world they inhabit. Paddington does this. Don’t get me wrong, I really like the Idiot. There are passages in the Idiot that are some of Dostovesky’s best, such as the description of a mock execution and some of the later scenes with Ippolit, a young man tragically dying of tuberculosis. However, the overall impact of Prince Myshkin on society gets lost and muddled.
Paddington and Paddington 2 are focused in a way the Idiot is not. Everything, even seemingly throwaway jokes, come into play later in the movie. It does slapstick comedy like the best silent films. It does the Wes Anderson style without the ennui and latent darkness. To show Paddington isolation, it has impossible camera moves down pipes like David Fincher. It balances desolate lows with euphoric highs. There are incredibly beautiful scenes where the boundaries of reality and fantasy become fluid, like when Paddington’s Aunt Lucy is shown exploring pop-up book London. I laughed, I literally cried, it’s that good!
And what carries the movies is the character of Padddington, an innocent bear newly arrived in the capital city of London. Paddington is always good, always compassionate, and always loving. His naivete gets him in trouble, some people think he’s an idiot bear up to no good, but his beautiful soul always does a transforming work on the people he encounters. This little bear, even if seen as a little foolish, can serve as an example to all of us as we show love and compassion to the world around us. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
