(Br)Exit pursued by a bear: Paddington's polysemic political power as the `new Grim Reaper'

Though hailing from distant “darkest Peru”, Paddington Bear has become a bastion of British identity. His critically-acclaimed films (2014, 2017, 2024), starring icons of British cinema, trade on nostalgic national tropes. This symbolic imbrication peaked in 2022, starring alongside Queen Elizabeth II in her Platinum Jubilee celebrations – and later becoming a symbol of collective mourning, materially and digitally, after her death. Paddington – endangered and repeatedly imperilled onscreen – thus became the Establishment’s new mor(t)al totem, what Douglas Davies would call a ‘paradigmatic’ figure ‘good to think’ in life, and in death. His incongruously cuddly ‘Grim Reaper’ became a globally recognisable meme. Yet, since symbols are malleable, and film-based memes subversive and satirical, Paddington has proved a provocative meme(nto mori). Analysing social media posts (X, Instagram) and the films, this article explores Paddington Bear the Grim Reaper as politically polysemic. If, following Robert Hertz, society grieves those ‘in whom it incarnates itself, and with whom it identifies itself’, Paddington’s mortal multivocality forces a reckoning. Whose lives – and deaths – are grievable? And which version of Britishness should Paddington embody: the polite, Establishment-aligned “Good Immigrant”, or the racialised, once-incarcerated refugee?