Review of Ted (2012) by Shiira — 28 Aug 2012

Karen wants Andy to stop lying. Why did Maggie, the mother's best friend, fall out of their seventh story apartment window? She knows her son. He's sweet. But whose footprints are those on the kitchen counter top? She needs answers.

Andy tells her mother that his belated birthday gift, a Good Guy doll, is actually Charles Lee Ray, an angel who was sent down from heaven by daddy to look over him. "Chucky" for short, the man otherwise known as "The Lakeshore Strangler", is evil incarnate, and in the guise of a slightly effeminate doll, the possessed toy manipulates Andy into being his collaborator, in Tom Holland's Child's Play.

What Andy really needs is a dog, but they're city dwellers, Chicagoan urbanites, living in an apartment complex that's probably not hospitable to animals. John Bennett(an only child just like Andy), on the other hand, resides in the suburbs, yet his cheap parents get him a teddy bear for Christmas, when they could easily accommodate a cute puppy for their lonely son.

Lacking the wherewithal of imagination that can bring a stuffed animal to life through role-playing, John wishes for his bear to be instilled with life, just as a shooting star traverses across the dusky sky outside the Bennett household.

To some, the shooting star, is a sign of good things to come, but for others, it can be representative of a fallen angel, or worse, Satan himself. The film assumes the former, and yet a case could be made for the alternative.

No Hobbes, this Ted, since people can see and hear the bear, starting with John's flummoxed parents, whose reaction towards the living breathing stuffed animal is not much different from Karen's own horror when Chucky suddenly comes to life in her hands.

Genres are fluid things. Mrs. Bennett compares Ted to the baby Jesus, a miracle, whereas the possession of the Good Guy doll constitutes a thaumaturgical event, the practitioning of voodoo, thereby animating the inanimate with diabolism, a curse.

Similar to Chucky, the teddy bear has two voices: a canned one, devised by the toy company, and a real one, as if produced by actual vocal cords. While Chucky is a known quantity, we know next to nothing about Ted's linguistical origins.

Who is he, really? When Charles Ray performs the same translocating spell at the Barclay apartment as the one at the toy store, the loci of power that hovers over Andy is distinguished by a fulmination from the heavens, making them "thunder buddies", just like John and Ted, who hide under the covers from the inclement weather as children.

In a sense, they're hiding from God. Years later, during a fight, after John calls his best friend "Teddy Ruxpin"(a sort of slur), the first thing that Ted does is grab a Gideon Bible from the motel drawer, and flings it at the thirty-something burnout, who blames the bear for his girlfriend calling it quits.

Later, when John and Lori reconcile, they get married at a pagan church, a quasi-religious ceremony based on the teachings of Flash Gordon, with Sam J. Jones residing. Happy ending notwithstanding, Ted is the root cause of John's extended adolescence; his slacker lifestyle, an evocation of the idiom "the devil finds work for idle hands".

At 35, John has a dead end job at a car rental agency, and spends most of his free time on the sofa, getting stoned and watching bad movies with Ted. But things could be worse. Like Hellboy, the star of the Gullimero del Toro films, Ted fell in the right hands, in which kindness helped nurture win the fight over nature, and tempered the inherent wickedness of the monster.

The filmmaker, intentional or not, accentuates the bear's position as a surrogate dog, when the short-lived celebrity, bristling over having to find menial work, says: "This is how the cast of Different Strokes feel every hour.

" Julie Sawyer, a struggling actress in Samuel Fuller's White Dog, loses a role to Laura Drummond, whose last name, of course, is the same as the father who adopts Willis and Arnold. Easily Ted could have taken to hate crimes, along the lines of Julie's German shepherd, a "white dog", or rather, an attack dog, specially trained to kill black people.

Donny, the stalker who kidnaps Ted, has the potential of undoing the bear's sound upbringing, thereby intensifying the racist disposition the stuffed animal has towards Latinos into action. At a drug-fueled party, the stoned pair talk about opening an Italian restaurant, an exclusive one, if Ted has his way.

While the bear concedes to permitting Jews as patrons, he draws the line on Mexicans. A misogynist, too, Ted displays a particular hatred for the local women. In that aforementioned fight with John, the comic tone of their no holds barred brawl obscures Ted's intent to kill John.

His disrespect for the "good book" reveals the latent devil inside. Without the counterbalancing effect of love, Ted could have become a "brown bear", or perhaps, "The Boston Strangler".