Went To See Paddington, the Movie

Books About Children and Memory

1.    The Holocaust Conference this year at Pacific Lutheran University happens to have a focus on The Children’s Transport.  I think it is typical that the Conference takes a focus like that as a theme – it increases the idea, so the theme of children becomes general within the conference.

Just now I have been looking at a new book, Everlasting Lane, by Andrew Lovett, about a ten-year-old who moves to a house with his mother and finds that memories reawaken.  They lived there before and the story is about reasons why his parents hid his earlier memories from him.  The narrator is present in the now, 2015, and recounts his experience at ten in about 1975. 

2.     Also, I have re-read some of the VI Warshawski stories.  (I began reading the series at Tunnel Vision, a book I discovered on the shelves at the building where I live.  I had not known of the author or the series.)  Presently I am re-reading again Total Recall.  Warshawski and her friends trust the truth told by a claimer of Holocaust origins, even though the details come from reclaimed memory under hypnosis.  When the hypnosis subject endured the holocaust, he was a very young child, perhaps three years old.  Another character in Total Recall was brought to England in the Children’s Transport.

The trusted psychologist-hypnotist in Total Recall meets another character who wants to publish a book about her work with the subject.  She envisions a successful movie made from the book and thinks Dustin Hoffman would be a good actor to play the character.

3.   I went to see Paddington, the movie, it put me off to watch Mrs. Brown and the Brown family glorified at the expense of non-parents as the villains.   (It seems in one chapter of a Paddington Book Paddington, taken to a play, heads toward a villain actor to complain about his treatment of an actress.  He has taken the story all too seriously.  Perhaps I take the offense to non-parents too seriously.)  But, Millicent, Ms. Millicent, who does not seem to deserve more than a child’s name, seems to be a non-parent working woman.   She is Devoted to Taxidermy. 

From the Michael Bond Books

Paddington probably was not appropriate for me in 1958, but after graduate school I read a few children’s books.  I did not remember a story about skinning and stuffing Paddington.  That story seems to be borrowed from A Hundred and One Dalmatians.   Maybe I have forgotten.

Paddington is celebrated as being inspired by the Kindertransport.  There is an article that refers to this and to the London Opening of the movie.  There are movie references to the Kindertransport and the Taxidermy references are meant to compare the plight of animals to the Holocaust, that seems very honest.  The movie has a lot of very pretty moments.