- Book Excerpt: The Otherworld: The Mythic Dimensions of Christophe Gans by Scout Tafoya (August 6, 2026)
In this excerpt from his book The Otherworld: The Mythic Dimensions of Christophe Gans, author and RogerEbert.com contributor Scout Tafoya gets into the French director’s parallels to the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and the video games that inspired his work.
First person POV camera was de rigueur in Japanese games by the time Team Silent’s “Silent Hill” was released in 1999 for PlayStation. Its visual language is distinctly Tarkovskian, with its floating ‘camera’, fogbound abandoned buildings, and creatures suffering from what appears to be radioactive fallout (pale white forms with the skin conditions of the first crews sent to fight the fires at Chernobyl). The idea of a shapeshifting landscape as exploration of a fractured conscience/consciousness is the throughline of the “Silent Hill” games. In “Solaris,” a phantom alien planet (possibly a lifeform) starts playing havoc with a crew of orbiting astronaut’s sense of reality. When Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is sent to take stock, the planet begins changing his perception of the world and introduces him to the invincible ghost of his deceased wife (played by Sergei Bondarchuk’s daughter Natalya). Like the protagonist James Sunderland in “Silent Hill 2,” he’s ‘searching’ for his wife and finds her ghost. In “Solaris” the ghost is a projection beamed up from the planet of the title. Not a ghost, but a psychic apparition, which is practically speaking, the same thing (though the orthodox Christian Tarkovsky surely knew which one he believed). So the hero of “Solaris” must decide if what he’s seeing is his mind’s work, a planet’s work, or god’s; a million miles and years from home, where religion is only represented in the natural world he chooses to leave behind. In saying goodbye to the earth’s corporeal suggestion (people, grass, birds, family, art) for the last time on his way into orbit around Solaris, he’s rejecting ‘god’ for science (Tarkovsky himself grappling with it in being a filmmaker constantly filming art and the creation of art as an antidote to war and austerity – the long drive back to the city in “Solaris” his best impression of a world without god), only to discover they can’t describe each other. And film thus is the only way to question god’s absence. What would Tarkovsky have made of a video game like “Silent Hill,” about the search for god in an artifact of pure scientific construction? As “Stalker” has it: “Don’t hope for flying saucers, that would be too interesting.”
On the 21st of May 2020 Team Silent designer Masahiro Ito took to Twitter to answer a question that’s plagued many a fan. “”Solaris” is one of novels which inspired the story of SH2.” Seems the loneliness of the COVID pandemic and the closeness we came to apocalypse finally convinced him to open up. For a moment the whole world was in The Zone. “Silent Hill” the game is an even stranger reckoning with the idea of god. If a movie is the obvious representation of a camera’s viewpoint (canted however the story or project deems fit), a video game like “Silent Hill” suggests that even the camera’s viewpoint is “god’s” viewpoint. A camera left in a field will collect data of the thing that passes before its gaze, including the time that elapses. Time and space in a video game are manmade. A digital time piece is never far from the menu options in a game, to tell you the speed at which you completed it, but also as a way to nudge the player towards the sum total of the work. Never mind a completion of the narrative but a proper showcase for all the work that went into making a sky a sky, and a man a man beneath it. When you have effectively mapped a whole world (a ‘zone’ of bottled incident and an internal clock) why wouldn’t you encourage your ‘user’ to explore it all? And then the game’s interaction with a user creates its own dialectic. God has made the game, but it’s now god with the controller in her hand. So who is in charge?
Tarkovsky died before Chernobyl, missing the fulfillment of his prophecy. The Soviets never got close to succeeding in their mission to impose state atheism on its people, you can’t do it when people already know what belief can mean. For the record a state without religion is the only sane option. People are religious, but a government is not and shouldn’t be, tautologically and morally speaking. People look to the state as the characters do in “Solaris”. To provide answers and get them out of tarrying in the real world. A state cannot be possessive of anything, let alone belief, so the lies are insurmountable before the starting gun has gone off. Further down the line Tarkovsky missed his aesthetic upholstery and theological yearning becoming the centerpiece vassal for a new hierarchy of artistic expression. Between “Crime & Punishment” and “Silent Hill” lay “Stalker” and “Solaris”, and a representation of the moral condition of being alive in a post-theist industrial present (the future, we can safely say, has arrived) is copied and copied and copied. The games have been remade and turned into films which spawned sequels. A manmade god being reproduced by man and vice versa all the way down.
To play “Silent Hill,” about a man’s search for meaning in a zone of his own (split into components: the ‘Fog World’ and the ‘Otherworld’, hell and purgatory; heaven out of reach and beside the point), created by designers as a reflection of an aesthetic philosophy born of an existential condition, is to enter a cinematic dialectic. “Stalker’s” script tells one story, the camera another, and the scenery yet another. All of them wrap around the intangible of Tarkovksy’s terror at God’s silence, per Bergman. “Silent Hill” the game can only be a reassuring riff on Tarkovsky because the world is demonstrably a creation, and creating a world for your users is itself an act of faith. The town of Silent Hill is ‘built’ for each of its protagonist’s individual journeys.
In “Return to Silent Hill,” Gans adaptation of Silent Hill 2, the journey through the radioactive fallout and the warped territory in James’ (played in the film by Jeremy Irvine) recollection, marries “Stalker’s” existential searching (the act of looking replacing decisive action; a country’s ruin as a fantastical dimension where hope can infect one like cancer cells or a drug, depending on one’s outlook), Mirror’s floating continuity of sense memory stitched together through his father’s poetry, and “Solaris’” deranged heartache syndrome at the corridor of experience, guilt, and bargaining. Gans works hard to earn close-ups like those of the gaunt heroes and fulsome wives and mothers in Tarkovsky, whose heroes don’t have control, but are at the Otherworld’s mercy. In Solaris a widower is powerless to stop inviting his wife’s ghost into his bedroom. In “Mirror” a dying man looks back at an active past in which he cannot participate. In “Stalker” a man is addicted to the toxicity of “The Zone”, the colorized netherworld brought about by extraterrestrial intelligence attached to the monochrome real of ‘modern’ Russia. All three films predict Chernobyl (an obvious model for Silent Hill’s noxious barometer); worlds undone by regret and mad science. The personal and political entwined like lovers in reverie. Like James and Mary. The fallout and its ashen skies are always a few hours away.
Perhaps it’s because the Japanese spent the 20th century tallying the cost of material absolutes and demented moral abdication (in World War 2 alone: kamikaze pilots [“The craziest thing about World War 2” -My 9 year old nephew, unprompted], cannibalism and mass suicides in the South Pacific, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Rape of Nanking, Kuril Island, Unit 731), Team Silent needed a model for a psychic intangible like Stalker outside of their own. By 1999 a huge part of Japanese culture had been adduced through American example, as carried over by their conquerors in the years after the Emperor surrendered. American gangster movies, westerns and war movies, jazz, comic books – as when Yasujiro Ozu saw “Fantasia” and declared the US the victor in the war well ahead of schedule, the certainty in a conflict must have spoken to a people who’d had the iron jaw of nationalism wedged open by the crowbar of capitalism. America demanded to be treated like they were at the top of the food chain. And while you can make a good first-person shooter out of that attitude, there’s little philosophical breathing room.
- All is Well in Our World: On Todd Haynes’ “Safe” (August 6, 2026)
Early on in Todd Haynes’ “Safe,” an unwatched television broadcasts a half-heard report on Elizabeth Bouvia, a woman paralyzed by cerebral palsy and stricken with degenerative arthritis. Bouvia became a figurehead for the American right-to-die movement in the 1980s. She wanted ultimate control over decisions made about her body and went to court, and then appellate court, to win it. Even with the help of the ACLU, she was denied it. The hero of “Safe,” delicate, beautiful, WASPish Carol (Julianne Moore) wears a pained look as the Bouvia report unspools in the background.
This is Haynes expressing his thesis. Carol doesn’t have control over her body, either. She’s centered as she will be often throughout the film at the exact middle of the frame. Haynes and his cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy (“Lisa”) will shrink the environment around her with slow zooms, with doorways, window panes, environmental elements to underscore how trapped Carol is: a prisoner of a society designed to degrade women into specific roles while requiring from them a narrowly-prescriptive appearance constructed from a combination of makeup, the wardrobe of the moment (all those Olivia Newton-John “Physical”/Jane Fonda Workout leotards!) and body modification. Haynes frames Carol the way a lepidopterist preserves pretty butterflies. Throughout “Safe,” she is carefully arranged, posed for undignified post-mortem display, cold and formulated to a frame for all to see in her exquisite loveliness.
Todd Haynes, a poet of women in crisis, first came to my notice as a rumor, a cautionary tale about a brilliant young filmmaker who made a movie that attracted the wrong kind of attention from a major corporation. After his discomfiting queer portmanteau “Poison” (1991) became a minor arthouse sensation, stories about his “first first” film, a “lost” film started making the rounds.
His 1987 “Superstar” is ostensibly a biopic of doomed singer Karen Carpenter, made on a shoestring of a shoestring, an experimental exercise using plastic kid’s dolls to play out Carpenter’s rise to fame and death from anorexia nervosa. I saw it on a bootleg VHS cassette ordered through mail order from a catalog warehouse operating out of Florida. It arrived in a plain, brown, paper package like all the best contraband does. I heard “Superstar” had been suppressed because of a lawsuit filed by Mattel, the company that owns Barbie, a few of which Haynes had progressively shaved down with a razor to stand as the singer at different stages of her emaciation.
In reality, it was the Carpenter estate that prevented the film’s release because of how Richard Carpenter was represented as callous, even complicit in Karen’s growing self-consciousness in the public eye. After all, Haynes argued, most of the dolls weren’t Mattel’s anyway. “Superstar” is a masterpiece. It’s the film I thought of often as the corrective for Greta Gerwig’s well-intended but unfocused “Barbie.” It’s a film about eating disorders that provides neither flesh to fetishize nor behaviors to imitate and it pinions the role of well-intentioned loved ones who in their love and desperation say the wrong things at exactly the wrong times. The rode to hell is paved with well-intended loved ones. Haynes understands the crucible of being looked at for women. In our culture, a woman’s value is often inextricable from her attractivity according to some arbitrary set of goalposts in constant brownian motion. Impossible to ever truly conform or to conform for long, in our culture, the cruel irony is how the only thing truly unforgivable is to fail to conform.
The first shot of “Superstar” is the discovery of Carpenter’s body through a half-open door. She, like “Safe’s” Carol is trapped in an architectural element offset within the frame of the film. Even here, he suggests, on this screen with them as the star, they are fragmented by our leering and comparing of their component parts. Haynes, from the start, has been a voice for those yearning to be seen as fully three-dimensional in a culture conditioned to see some only in one, maybe two dimensions.
For his Bob Dylan biopic “I’m Not There,” Haynes plays with our familiarity with the singer’s appearance by casting six actors, including a woman, Cate Blanchett, to portray him as six individual personae throughout the course of his mercurial career. If we stop looking at him, we can finally see him. In “Carol,” (2015) he reunites with Blanchett in a forbidden sapphic romance presented as a lush Douglas Sirk melodrama, a bookend to his “All That Heaven Allows” (1955) spiritual remake “Far from Heaven” (2002). Each are about the most vulnerable (not just women, but gay women) being forced into hiding in plain sight. Each are about the rapture of finally being recognized through the disguises you’ve been forced to assume. And the villain of each of his films is the oppressive influence of the “male gaze.”
Godard once referred to watching movies as a criminal act. From a dark place, we peer through a lighted square at the most private moments of people who are helpless but to be observed by us. Haynes understands the irony of making films—a thing to be looked at—about the oppressive horror of being looked at. Watch how Carol seems aware she’s under scrutiny and so is constantly performing in “Safe.” Nervous. Hungry for affirmation. Terrified of disappointing. The demand of maintaining a facade wears her down to a nub.
Carol’s husband Greg (Xander Berkeley) makes her sick. She lays prone and lifeless during sex. She vomits when he pulls her into an embrace. She blames his cologne (he’s not wearing any) or his clothes. Really, it’s just him. Mark the times Carol’s illness flares throughout “Safe.” She has a bad episode after he compliments her new perm. She gets a nosebleed after getting the perm in the first place, the new style an impulsive act while waiting at her spa for a hair appointment and a manicure. She’s done it for herself, but all Greg sees is a new kink for his married libido.
The sequencing of Carol’s attacks (sneezes to rashes to shortness of breath and worse) mirrors the rhythms of Alfred Hitchcock’s cadence of attacks in “The Birds” (1963). In that film, a strong woman, notorious for her disdain for the norms of an abusive patriarchal society, gradually surrenders to them at the beckoning call of domesticity. Like Carol, Hitchcock’s heroine Melanie (Tippi Hedren), aquiline and startlingly beautiful by contemporary standards (she’s introduced in the film with a wolf whistle), is punished by avatars of the environment at every step along the path of her voluntary weakening and assimilation.
In “Safe,” Carol’s punisher for her surrender to her diminishment isn’t birds, but “environmental illness,” a catchall diagnosis favored by wellness cult leader Peter (Peter Friedman) in whose remote New Mexican retreat Carol institutionalizes herself. It’s her last resort after being patronized and dismissed by doctors; gossiped about and clucked over by her hollow, competitive and jealous friends; even rejected by a child at a baby shower towards whom she tries to be maternal. Yes, Carol is allergic to her environment. Her environment is the hostile superficiality of the suburbs.
Note how the other patients at Peter’s compound are largely women and minorities—all save gentle Chris (James Le Gros) who represents a softer kind of masculinity that respects Carol’s need for physical space and time to heal. He walks her to the hermetically-sealed bubble she’s taken over and doesn’t try to lean in for a hug or a buss on the cheek. He doesn’t force himself on her the way her husband, even though Greg’s proximity to Carol causes her obvious discomfort, does. Chris doesn’t think Carol is irritating. He would never use a word like “hysterical.” He seems to know that Carol’s illness has something to do with her being forced to be something that she isn’t. That’s what she’s sick of.
As Carol, Moore, in her breakout role, is extraordinary. She’s an exposed nerve, twitching with every minor shift in the air. After an aerobics class her friends marvel that Carol doesn’t sweat and Carol shrinks as though she’s been chastised. She doesn’t conform to the norm even in perspiration and non-conformance is wrong. No one can see Carol because Carol is the prettiest girl in the room.
One night, alone in her room, a stone dislodges in her and Carol sobs as though her heart has broken. Another patient finds her, an older woman, and tells her that all the feelings that Carol is feeling are “just fine.” It’s possibly the first time anyone has ever told Carol that whatever she feels is okay to feel. I say this as a child of abuse that the requirement to not feel “wrong” is hardwired into some of us. The need to appease in order to avoid attention supercedes personal care to the extent that it becomes hard to even know what it is you do feel. You start to wonder if you can feel anything at all. Carol is starting to accept herself here. The end of “Safe” is her breaking the fourth wall—a “no-no” in a medium dominated by a male gaze that despises being recognized—and repeating “I love you. I really love you” to, essentially, us, her unobserved observers. In seeing herself, she sees us, too. I wonder if it’s true in the reverse. “Safe” is a prayer for acceptance, you see. For Carol. For us. Amen.
Criterion’s 4K restoration of “Safe” has been overseen by Haynes. Its uncompressed (the real VIP in 4K technology) mono soundtrack haunts with Brendan Dolan and Ed Tomney’s hypnotic, synth-drenched, trancelike score and a diegetic soundscape heavy on environmental effects like traffic in the first hour, nature in the second. A lovely, warm commentary track with Haynes, Moore, and producer Christine Vachon sheds light on the process of Moore’s performance and some of the philosophy of the film’s deconstruction of personal identity and a short video of Haynes and Moore in conversation shows off the obvious comfort between the two that has led to multiple, phenomenal, collaborations. Vachon sits for an interview separately that repeats a little of her commentary contribution and a 1978 short film—“The Suicide,” alas, and not “Superstar” rounds out the disc. Haynes was seventeen when he made this disquieting montage film about a child (David Blaikie), slight and with a stutter, who’s bullied at his new school. The agony of not being seen. The confused melange of sex and isolation in a boy on the edge of adolescence. It’s uncompromising and uncomfortable. Incredible work. Haynes was already Haynes here. “The Suicide” is a tough watch but a valuable one.
The critic Dennis Lim offers a typically smart essay, written for the 2014 release of this film, in the enclosed booklet. It’s required reading for a survey of Haynes as well as a better understanding of “Safe.” Lim reads it, among other things, as having a “science-fiction sheen” and indeed if the pillars of science fiction are time, identity and space then “Safe” is certainly those things. He describes Carol’s two homes in the film as “prisons of the self.” It’s a description so fine and incisive that it took a lot for me not to just steal it.
I didn’t see “Safe” in the theater so this release represents the absolute best I’ve ever seen this film. Shadow detail is intricate in its night sequences, and blacks are crushless. There’s no color bleed. You could maybe argue the images are even too sharp, but really, any complaint about the A/V presentation feels like a quibble. “Safe” has never looked better. In a film about the horror of being looked at, I’m struggling with how to rationalize my joy.
- It’s Libidinal: Hannah Einbinder and Jane Schoenbrun on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (August 6, 2026)
In Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” horror, cinema, and desire are intertwined. Though similar in some respects to their previous films, “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” in how it explores the complex relationships we develop to the media we consume and the impact this can have on our respective identities, it’s also something more unexpected and expansive for them as a filmmaker. Namely, it’s a horror film of blood geysers and romance where the looming presence of a “little death” is the most important thing.
Set in the Pacific Northwest, the film stars Hannah Einbinder (“Hacks”) as a filmmaker who is tasked with remaking a classic slasher film for a new generation and working with the original film’s star (played by “X-Files” icon Gillian Anderson) who has made her home at the camp where it was shot. As the two begin to connect and grow closer, with plenty of sparks flying, much more than just a horror remake emerges. The film is humorous in how it explores this, but it also doesn’t skimp on the horror, bringing plenty of blood that had otherwise been missing from Schoenbrun’s previous works. It was one of the buzziest films premiering at Cannes and now will release in theaters starting August 7.
Before the release, Schoenbrun and Einbinder spoke with RogerEbert.com about their love for the Pacific Northwest, the joys of making movies you’re passionate about, finding a great collaborative partner in the other, taking a leap with someone you trust by your side, blood geysers, and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
I’m speaking to you from the Pacific Northwest and, while I know the film didn’t actually shoot here, Jane, I wanted to start with you on that. What was it that appealed to you about setting it in the Pacific Northwest?
Schoenbrun: Listen, I love the Pacific Northwest.
Einbinder: Yeeees!
Schoenbrun: I’ve got, like, Pacific Northwest lore bleeding out of my ears.
Einbinder: Out the wazoo.
Schoenbrun: Oh my god, Olympia? “Twin Peaks?”
Einbinder: Shout out. Hoh Rain Forest, heard of it?
Schoenbrun: Seattle, grunge. We were in Portland literally yesterday. I love the Pacific Northwest. Where I live in upstate New York, it’s like we’re cosplaying the Pacific Northwest. But I’m gonna be brutally honest with you.
Einbinder: I’m scared.
Schoenbrun: I wrote … I’m gay.
Einbinder: [Laughs]
Schoenbrun: I wrote the film as being the sleepaway camp that I went to as a kid, which was in Western Massachusetts. There and the Catskill region of New York is probably 90% Jewish sleepaway camps. It’s a very specific culture. It’s very unique. I really wanted to film there, but it was cheaper to film in Canada. So we went to Vancouver, which was awesome. I ultimately am very, very happy we shot in Vancouver. But it was like, “Okay, we’re shooting in Vancouver. We’re shooting in the summertime. You’re gonna see a lot of trees. You’re gonna see the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. We can’t fake this for New York.” I had this great joke about how she was going to visit Billy in Buffalo, Buffalo Bill, and then the agent was gonna be like, “Oh, that’s very writerly.”
Einbinder: Yes, I remember that.
Schoenbrun: But that didn’t make it in. So this was a coincidence that I made my first Pacific Northwest movie, but I’m happy I did, and I hope to make many more.
The film, I mean this as a compliment, is both loopy and liberatory to watch.
Schoenbrun: Yeah, thank you.
Did it feel that way, loopy and liberatory, to make it for you both?
Einbinder: I wasn’t feeling totally loopy. Maybe we were feeling loopy when we were off the clock, when it was goof o’clock, which, you know, happened a ton. But I think we were really playful, yet (I don’t wanna use the word serious) I think we were passionate about the subject matter and embracing the themes head-on.
Schoenbrun: It’s an incredibly ambitious film with the amount of coordinated, sustained focus, and labor interdepartmentally. The magic trick of pulling it off in the time we had with the money we had was one of the more challenging things ever. For me, I do think it was liberatory and freeing. More than any other film, on this set I felt not stress, but joy and playfulness. That was a testament not just to how hard everyone was working, but also the deep trust I felt with all of my collaborators, both in front of and behind the camera. I really felt like myself in a way that I think is reflected in the movie. I felt liberated by it for sure.
Hannah, this was your first leading role in a feature film, which you obviously can’t always control how that shakes out, but did you feel that trust as well taking that leap?
Einbinder: Oh my god, absolutely. I mean, Jane and I just vibed from our first conversations. Then when we started to work together, and started to have more deep conversations about what the film was attempting to explore, it just became clear that I was gonna be in a safe environment to explore these pretty heavy and emotional things. It was intimidating, moving from TV to film, even though I think that “Hacks” is a particularly filmic TV show. Like the approach to making it feels like filmmaking. But I do think that shooting on film and having a 25-day shoot and having to tell a story in full in this … I’m describing a movie, totally. It just felt like there was a lot of pressure that I put on myself, but the second that we started to actually do it, it just fell into place and I felt comfortable.
Jane, so much of this movie is about feeling comfortable within one’s own body, which I really resonated with, but I was curious about, when you were first talking with Hannah, what was it that was on your mind?
Schoenbrun: When I’m meeting an actor that I could potentially work with, I think so much of it is just getting to know a human being and trying to sense what their process is gonna be. I’ve worked with a lot of different actors who want different things and I’ve learned how to have relationships and collaborations. There’s always going to be an emotional and psychological element to building trust, understanding what somebody needs, and how to build a shared language to get them in tune with the thing you’re trying to make. If I could choose, every collaboration would feel like my collaboration with Hannah, which is working with somebody who is down to be emotionally engaged.
I want to make movies. When I’m making a movie, I don’t wanna feel like, “Oh, this is our day job and we all kinda hate it, but we’re gonna get through it.” I want it to feel like we are doing something that’s important to all of us, and we are exploring vulnerable things together. This is like play and exploration in a space that’s different from reality. And that’s rare, you know, to find somebody who really has the appetite for that and the desire for that and who wants to push together into scary places. It’s not always that you find collaborators who want that. I just knew immediately that that’s the kind of work I would get to do with Hannah, and it was such a treat.
Einbinder: Thanks Jane.
The image I think of when I think of this film is the blood geyser. It’s this big explosion of violence, but then also an excitement of seeing it. How did you achieve that, Jane, and how did you conceive of that specific visual?
Einbinder: [whispering in a French accent] The geyser.
Schoenbrun: What’d you say?
Einbinder: [louder, again in a French accent] The geyser.
Schoenbrun: [laughs] Hannah’s doing her French accent.
Einbinder: [once more, in a French accent] The geyser.
Schoenbrun: They love the geyser in French. No, the geyser was there from the beginning. It was a foundational idea for this film. My first two films sometimes get called horror movies, but there’s not blood in either of them. They’re very buttoned-up movies in their way. I wanted this line in the sand from the very beginning of like, “This movie is gonna be different, and this movie is letting its hair down, and it’s gonna be excessive and playful and profane and mischievous in a way that you might not expect.” So that image of just like the excess of that blood and also the fact that in no way could that really be what that person’s blood would do, it’s completely fantastic and absurd right off the bat. Yeah, it’s a line in the sand, basically.
We had a lot of fun doing it practically. It’s supplemented with some awesome VFX. I literally in my lookbook that I sent to the team of reference images for that scene, I was pulling archival photos of, like, striking oil. That’s how I wanted it to feel. It’s like that moment in “There Will Be Blood” at the beginning when it’s like, “Oh!” And you just see it explode. It’s libidinal.
“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” opens in U.S. theaters August 7, via MUBI.
- Happy Birthday Tibetan Buddhist Scholar and Professor Robert Thurman (1941-2026) (August 6, 2026)
On August 3th, 2026, as I was writing to wish Professor Robert Thurman a happy birthday, I was saddened to learn that he passed away in Woodstock on June 16th of this year. Now I am wondering whether he will appear in my dreams. Let me explain.
As I slept on August 3rd, 2018, I had a dream that I was in a Tea House being taught Buddhism by Robert Thurman. We were sitting at a table in a modest structure, and he was outlining the precepts for me on a small white board. After our talk, I entered a nearby town, and as I walked among the people, I became aware that I could read their thoughts or feel their emotions. I noticed that there was no judgment, only feelings of kindness and compassion. It was extraordinary. When I wrote about my dream, I got messages on social media that it was Professor Thurman’s birthday!
NEW YORK – MAY 23: Actress Uma Thurman and her father Robert Thurman attend the grand opening of the Longchamp U.S. flagship store in Soho May 23, 2006 in New York City. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Getty Images)
I didn’t know Professor Thurman well. He is the father of actress Uma Thurman, and the grandfather of actress Maya Hawke, Uma’s daughter with Ethan Hawke. I had met the professor only once or twice and found him to be very intelligent, oddly shy, and personable. But he exuded an energy of kindness that I have felt in only a few other people. I never expected to dream about him. When I wrote about the dream on social media, I received lots of birthday wishes. I had to quickly put out a correction that it was Professor Thurman’s birthday, not mine.
Through a mutual friend, Marjorie Layden, he contacted me and told me about his dream, the same night, of having tea at a table with a goddess (small “g” as in a goddess deity). I was flabbergasted. It is still one of the most astonishing things I have experienced. The table he described and the small place where he had tea with a goddess matched the place in my dreams, except my table was sat up with a white board where he was teaching me Buddhism. He was fascinated as I told him about the town I walked through in my dream after my lesson in Buddhism from him.
I relayed my dream of walking silently through crowds of people on the street, and I told him that as I passed each person I could tell whether they felt isolated and alone or whether they were kind and empathetic. It reminded me of some of the words from Simon & Garfunkel’s song “Sounds of Silence.”
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone…
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence…
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
in the words that it was forming
And the sign said:
“The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence”
We spoke of the need for compassion in the world and of true connection among people. That talk with him is still one of the most profound I can remember having with another. I wish I could remember what he was teaching me about Buddhism in the dream. I do know that the dream served partially as a catalyst for the book I ultimately wrote: It’s Time to Give a FECK: Elevating Humanity Through Forgiveness, Empathy, Compassion and Kindness.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama (R) and Robert Thurman attend The Newark Peace Education Summit press conference at the Robert Treat Hotel on May 12, 2011 in Newark, New Jersey. (Photo by D Dipasupil/FilmMagic)
Now that I’ve learned of his passing, I have immersed myself in finding out more about him, and the high points of his life read like a novel. Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman—or Bob, as he told me to call him—was born on August 3rd, 1941 in New York City. He was a former Buddhist monk ordained by the Dalai Lama who earned a doctorate from Harvard in Sanskrit and Indian studies (now called “Indic” Studies). Bob taught at Amherst and Columbia, and it was at the latter university where he presided over the first endowed chair in Buddhist studies in the West, founding the American Institute of Buddhist Studies in 1972. In 1987, he founded Tibet House U.S. along with Richard Gere and Philip Glass.
As an idealistic high schooler at age 17, he left Phillips Exeter Academy without permission to join Fidel Castro in Cuba, but was stopped in Florida before crossing the border. He was expelled from the Academy because of this, but had already been accepted at Harvard, so they honored his previous acceptance. An accident involving a race car claimed Bob’s left eye in 1961, leading him to shift the focus of his life entirely. Briefly, he made his way to India, where he taught English to young reincarnated Tibetan lamas in exile. He spent the rest of his life espousing compassion. And the many astonishments of his life go on and on.
Do you see why I hold out hope that he may somehow appear in my dreams once more?
I extend my deepest condolences to his widow, the former Nena von Schlebrügge; his daughter, Uma Thurman; his sons Ganden, Dechen and Mipam; his daughter from his first marriage, Taya Thurman; and his extended family.
May his teachings about kindness and compassion endure.
- Apple TV+’s “Ted Lasso” Gets Back on the Pitch For a Welcome Season 4 (August 5, 2026)
After an unlikely beginning as a series of NBC Sports TV commercials in 2013 and a spectacular, awards-spangled run on Apple TV as a beacon of mental health positivity and Capra-esque optimism, “Ted Lasso” ended on a near-perfect note. The Season 3 finale in May 2023 leaned into the time-honored rituals of TV finales, with Jason Sudeikis’ iconic title character and a half-dozen beloved supporting players finding closure—or moving on to the next chapters of their lives.
The original plan was for a three-season arc, and the instincts were spot on.
I thought it was the right time to say goodbye, especially to Ted. Had he chosen to remain in London after spending nearly three years away from his adolescent son Henry in Kansas City, all of his heartfelt angst about their separation would have started to ring hollow.
Fast forward more than three years later, after Sudeikis said he had finally found a new story worth telling, and good news is that despite a few credulity-defying plot points that slingshot Ted back to London, where he’s once again a fish getting used to the water, Season 4 is vintage “Ted Lasso.” It’s like returning to your hometown and finding out that your favorite restaurant, which had been closed for the last few years, has reopened with the same management and key staffers, but with some fresh new additions to the personnel and the menu. Nothing will top the original experience, but it’s still a breezy good time that brings a glow to your heart.
Season 4 picks up the story two years down the road, with Ted indeed living back home in K.C., and enjoying a close relationship with Henry (now played by Grant Feely from “Five Nights at Freddy’s”). I’m going to avoid specific spoilers that weren’t revealed in the trailer, but I will say I found Ted’s new job to be slightly inconsistent with the character we’ve come to know (though solid material for gentle laughs). The series’ brief stay in Kansas City includes the expected jokes about outsiders being confused by Kansas City, MO and Kansas City, KS, and stops at local touchstones including Gates BBQ on Main Street in Midtown; CPKC Stadium, home of the Kansas City Current of the NWSL; and a particularly poignant interlude at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, where a visitor from across the pond who knows nothing about the national pastime but is moved and inspired upon learning about the likes of Satchel Paige.
Just as Ted is experiencing a serious case of ennui, his old friends (and fan favorites) Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), Keeley (Juno Temple) and Higgins (Jeremy Swift) come calling with an offer he won’t refuse because if he did refuse we wouldn’t have a Season 4: Ted will return to Richmond to coach the Lady Greyhounds, a new second-division women’s football team. Cue the familiar themes of optimism in the face of daunting odds and the emotional healing that can come from being part of a found family, combined with old-fashioned sports action and pop culture-infused humor. (A partial list of references from just the first few episodes: Public Enemy, “Do the Right Thing,” “Casablanca,” the sentimental Chicago ballad “You’re the Inspiration,” Susan Boyle, the Beastie Boys, “Mean Girls,” “The Lost Boys” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”)
A number of series regulars are absent, either because the actors weren’t available or their characters had exited at the conclusion of Season 3, but in addition to the aforementioned trio, it’s a treat to be reunited with Brett Goldstein’s still-growling Roy Kent and Brendan Hunt’s deeply weird and equally endearing Coach Beard, among others. The writing remains top-tier, whether it’s one character noting without irony, “I finally watched ‘Breaking Bad.’ Hilarious,” or something as simple as Keeley saying, “Can we talk?” and Rebecca responding with “Always,” which melts our heart because we know the history of the friendship between these two.
Still, Season 4 would have been nothing but a Greatest Hits collection without the infusion of new cast members who quickly create indelible, sympathetic, and unique impressions. Tanya Reynolds (“Sex Education”) is a breakout star as Alice Chilton, a reserved, seemingly humor-impaired coach trying to find her footing alongside the bromance duo of Ted and Coach Beard, Abbie Hern resonates as a new star striker, and Jude Mack has a kind of Roy Kent-esque blunt charm as Boots, a talented goalkeeper who refuses to wear gloves because she relishes the sharp painful sting of making a save with her bare hands. (Comedic legend Tracey Ullman contributes scene-stealing work as well.) It’s remarkable how quickly we come to embrace the quest of the Lady Greyhounds.
In an era where the world—and much of prestige television—is filled with darkness and cynicism, “Ted Lasso” continues to make the case for empathy, not as hopelessly naive ideals, but as everyday choices and life goals. Season 4 wasn’t necessary, but it’s a welcome added time.
The first four episodes of “Ted Lasso” Season 4 were screened for review.
