A teddy bear's journey from gift to discarded trash

Teddy Bear Film Analysis

Pitch

The film is the story of how a stuffed teddy bear went from being a cherished memento given by a boyfriend to his girlfriend to roadside trash. The couple acquires the teddy bear together at the very beginning of the relationship and it signified a time of happiness for both of them. After that, the teddy bear was there in good times and in bad times and the girl used it a lot as something to hold when she was crying because she was unhappy.

Over time, she became more and more unhappy, especially in her relationship with her boyfriend. By the time they finally broke up the teddy bear had become very soiled and stained; the girl stored it in a box with her other old things and eventually just tossed it out as trash. The story is a retrospective that opens with a camera view of the old teddy bear lying on the side of the curb with the rest of the trash.

Film Analysis

The first scene is of the teddy bear lying face down in the street, half on the curb and half in the gutter, next to a box of discarded possessions waiting to be picked up by the trash collector. it's raining when the garbage truck comes the next morning but it isn't the regular garbage truck; just the recycled garbage collector. The sanitation worker tosses the bags of bottles and cans into the truck and turns around again to pick up the teddy bear. He holds it up and looks over it for a minute; he notices that the left rear paw seems to have been torn and then stitched back up.

The scene changes to focus on the teddy bear sitting on Karen's desk on a nice day; there are rays of sunshine glistening off the teddy bear's eyes. Karen is working at her desktop computer when she leans back to take a break. She looks at the teddy bear and smiles as she reaches over to pick it up. The camera zooms in on the teddy bear's left rear paw; it is very close to a thumbtack in the wall whose plastic has a chip in it. When Karen grabs the teddy bear, the paw rips on the sharp plastic edge of the thumbtack.

Karen obviously knows that the teddy bear has no feelings but it is so cute that part of her almost believes that she hurt it. She pets the teddy bear on the head and says "Oh, Teddy. I'm so sorry." Then, she says "Let's fix it and make it all better." Karen takes out her sewing kit and repairs the tear the best that she can. Afterwards, she giggles as she gets up to go to the medicine cabinet and reaches for the box of Band-Aids but changes her mind and skips back to her desk, still holding the teddy bear and still laughing. She picks up a black magic marker and uses it to make eight very small dots, four pair on each side of the repaired tear; then she draws very thin lines connecting each dot to its corresponding dot on the other side. By the time she gets done, it look just like the teddy bear got stitches.

The camera goes back to the sanitation worker. He turns the teddy bear over and notices the faded reddish-orange stains on the back of the teddy bear. As the camera fades out, there is the sound of Karen crying and Mark yelling. "What the Hell are you talking about that stupid stuffed animal for? I ask why you think our relationship is in trouble and you show me a teddy bear?" [Mark's voice is getting louder] "Talk to me, not the damned teddy bear!" Mark grabs the teddy bear roughly from Karen's grasp and flings it across the living room. It lands face-up near the sink and right on top of a dish that had spaghetti sauce on it from the night before. Karen runs over to grab the teddy bear and starts sobbing eve harder as she tries to scrub out the spaghetti sauce with soap and water. "I can't believe this" says Mark "You're more worried about a stupid teddy bear than about me! This is nuts!" Mark storms out of the house and Karen continues trying to get the stain out of the teddy bear. [Fade out]

The camera shot opens with the rain hitting the house. Karen can be heard talking on the phone as the camera pans around the house. A lot of the furniture and decorations are much different and the calendar on the wall is open to the month of May 2010. As the shot moves up the stairs and closer to Karen's room, her voice becomes audible: "Yeah, I just have some more trash to sort through but otherwise, I guess I'm all ready to give the keys back to the landlord. I'm not sure what time I'll be home but I should be leaving here by about 2:00 PM.

As Karen is looking through her boxes, she comes across the old teddy bear and she picks up almost reflexively and caresses it. She holds it and pets it and the camera on her and the teddy bear fades out. When the next scene opens, Mark has just won the teddy bear and Karen is clapping her hands in excitement. The scene cuts to Mark and Karen kissing in her room when they accidentally knock the teddy bear off the bed. Karen jumps up and grabs it off the floor. She brushes it off and playfully tells Mark to apologize for knocking "Teddy" of the bed.

In the next scene, Karen is remembering how she stitched up the teddy bear's leg after it was torn by the thumbtack. She it laughing as she looks through her desk drawer for the magic marker because she knows what she's going to do with it when she finds it. Then she remembers Mark's laughter when she showed him Teddy's stitches. The camera now follows Karen walking around the house and looking in every room to make sure nothing is left. As she walks around, she is holding the teddy bear against her chest and absent-mindedly petting it again. From over Karen's shoulder, the camera focuses on the face of the teddy bear. One of the eyes is cracked.

The last room Karen checks is the kitchen. She is still holding and petting the teddy bear when she stops in front of the sink. She stares at the spot on the counter where the teddy bear had landed that time that Mark threw it across the room. The camera is behind Karen but as she turns around, it focuses on the back of the teddy bear and on the stain left by the spaghetti sauce.

Karen carries a box to the curb and places it next to all the others. As she drops it, the teddy bear bounces out of the top and falls to the ground. She doesn't notice. The camera shot becomes a retrospective of various scenes of Karen crying to the teddy bear and of Mark throwing it across the room. The scene shifts a last time to the sanitation worker holding the teddy bear. He walks over to the front of his truck where he already has another old teddy bear tight to the front grill of the cab. He holds Karen's old teddy bear up next to the older stuffed animal and looks at them next to one another as though he is deciding which one to keep. Then he notices the reddish-orange stain on the back of Karen's teddy bear and he tosses it back into the box. It bounces off the edge and lands face-down on the street again. He doesn't notice either.