It’s impossible to know what you’re getting into when you start watching a Julio Torres production. The Salvadoran writer and director has made a name for himself because of his ingenious, fantastic, and unpredictable narratives that elicit deep reflections about the real world. We see this in Problemista, where Torres tells a unique immigration story, bringing autobiographical touches that question the very existence of migration, challenge the dreams sold to immigrants, and expose the ridiculousness of human documentation. Acting opposite Tilda Swinton — who clearly delighted in entering the comedian’s quirky world of unusual characters — Torres’ Problemista teeters between U.S. society’s disdain for immigrants and his characters' wacky and fantastical reinterpretations of these realities.
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In Max’s Fantasmas, Torres similarly constructs an alternative American reality through outlandish and polemical elements to make the audience laugh and reflect on the silliness of the systems we navigate as humans. (Warning: There are some spoilers in this review!) The protagonist, Julio, is a civilian who doesn’t officially exist — in the eyes of the government and polite society, that is — and several issues about his materiality are coalescing. To start, he is about to get evicted unless he can prove he exists. Simultaneously, he has an oyster-shaped mole on his neck that could be life-threatening. The only way to keep his apartment and get his mole checked out is to get a Proof of Existence, which Julio desperately wants to avoid because he morally opposes the act of officially existing (unfortunately, he doesn’t expand more on this, but I read his opposition as a recognition of the dehumanizing nature of bureaucratic documentation).
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"In Max’s Fantasmas, Torres similarly constructs an alternative American reality through outlandish and polemical elements to make the audience laugh and reflect on the silliness of the systems we navigate as humans."
nicole froio
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It’s not surprising our main character dislikes his own materiality because he himself lives untethered to our reality. After a meeting with Crayola where Julio advises the company to make clear crayons, our main character explains he simply wakes up in the morning and “Julios.” Upon further questioning, he says he can see shapes, colors, numbers, and the alphabet, where other people can’t. Julio’s talents are somewhat abstract, but what he seemingly means is he sees the deeper meanings behind all situations, which allows Fantasmas to go into longer than usual tangents about its side characters. For example, Julio discovers there’s a gay hamster nightclub called Fufu’s in New York, something others can’t perceive or understand. Julio’s aversion to materiality makes sense since his biggest talent is very conceptual and difficult to describe — unfortunately for him, that’s not what a capitalist society wants from him.
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Many reviews of Fantasmas focused on the weirdness and nonsensicality of the storytelling, but Torres’ real skill is challenging society’s biggest institutions with an innocence that is almost childlike but hardly — if ever — wrong. Why do we need to prove we exist to faceless corporations if it’s clear we are physically in this world? Why does society prioritize the needs and demands of businesses instead of providing free healthcare to its citizens? Why do grown adults go to jump rope class to get fit? At the heart of it all, Julio seems to ask how we can escape all these existential questions.
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"Why do we need to prove we exist to faceless corporations if it’s clear we are physically in this world? Why does society prioritize the needs and demands of businesses instead of providing free healthcare to its citizens? Why do grown adults go to jump rope class to get fit? At the heart of it all, Julio seems to ask how we can escape all these existential questions."
nicole froio
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When Julio discovers Incorporeal — a company that uploads and maintains people’s consciousnesses online, thereby foregoing their physical form, for $5 a month — he believes he found the solution to his problems. If he uploads his consciousness, he will no longer need a place to live, nor will he need to care about the health of his body. Therefore, he won’t need to prove he exists anymore. It gives him an out, a way to escape having to officially exist in some government register. Unfortunately, to forego his physical form and get uploaded — or cease to exist — he must first prove he exists.
The human necessity of having documents — which is clear in Problemista and continues as a reflexive thread in Fantasmas — and the hoops we must jump through to get them clearly fascinates Torres. You can have Proof of Existence if you have a good credit score, but you can only have a good credit score if you already exist. Fantasmas constantly points out the ridiculousness of these kinds of paradoxes, which are present in our everyday lives. Why does Julio need to prove he exists if we can see he does?
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Either way, the problem of existence lingers in Julio’s life. He either needs to prove he exists or get an exception, which is only available to extremely famous people who become household names, “like Beyoncé or the Minions,” according to the governing body Julio contacts. Thankfully, Julio already has an agent, Vanesja (Martine Gutierrez), who concocts a plan to feature her client in a pinkwashing credit card commercial. Once again, Julio must confront doing something he doesn’t want to do to get validation from a world in which he doesn’t truly enjoy existing. He successfully lands the commercials, but they end up altering his face so drastically that he is unrecognizable — therefore, he does not become famous or qualify for an exception. Vanesja sets up a meeting with a studio executive so Julio can write a TV show and hopefully get enough recognition to forgo the Proof of Existence.
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"The human necessity of having documents — which is clear in Problemista and continues as a reflexive thread in Fantasmas — and the hoops we must jump through to get them clearly fascinates Torres."
nicole froio
”
This is where we get to the heart of Fantasmas, the point when the TV show becomes clearer than ever. Whenever I watch Torres’ productions, I get the sense that 80% of it is a huge joke to him. I don’t mean he doesn’t take the work seriously — he clearly does as he has been delivering stellar work for years. Instead, I mean Torres, as a Latine director and writer, harnesses his position as an outsider of U.S. society to truly expose how inane American capitalism is. His obsession with lack of corporeality is about the possibility of not doing all of this meaningless stuff we must do as humans. Getting a job, getting money, applying for documents — none of them will matter once we are no longer in our physical states. At the core of Torres’ productions, he is telling us that it — as in, the world we humans invented for ourselves — is really not that serious. However, what Torres’ work also reveals is there are many people who do take this world entirely too seriously.
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As a last resort, Julio pitches a TV show to the studio executive (Natasha Lyonne), so he can get an exception from existing. Going against every bone in his body that tells him not to sell out to a corporation, Julio pitches a show called “How I Came Out To My Abuela,” which is the exact balance between diverse stories and liberal pandering the studio is looking to produce. As a weirdo writer who enjoys the surreality of magical realism, it’s impossible not to blur Julio, the character, and Torres, the writer and director, into one when Julio tells the studio exec: “You say you want ideas but you want them to fit into your boxes, so really, you don’t want anything new.” There’s a point in not noticing the systems that want to put us all in a Proof of Existence register: submission.
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"At the core of Torres’ productions, he is telling us that it — as in, the world we humans invented for ourselves — is really not that serious. However, what Torres’ work also reveals is there are many people who do take this world entirely too seriously."
nicole froio
”
In the backdrop, there are also a number of tangential stories, with the most colorful characters, that critique other aspects of life and existence in general. It’s almost like a sketch show, featuring too many cameos to count (Emma Stone and Amy Sedaris are only a few of the recognizable names), as well as a diverse cast of queer and gender nonconforming people of color. In all of the mini-stories, we follow the lives of people who are — just like Julio — looking for meaning in a world that wants us to simply exist as documents, money, achievements. What Fantasmas reveals is that there is life beyond “civilized” society; there is life outside of the system.
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When Julio’s weirdest stories are adapted into a community play, all of the queer characters, in their diversity of magical stories and styles, converge into Julio’s audience. Life outside of the system is, in the end, quite simple: finding your people and making things for them. Rejecting the corporate formulas for representation — a concept Julio is openly critical of — and the need for profit, Torres reimagines a world where art is for the people rather than for lining the pockets of studio execs.
Regional Diversity: N/A
It’s hard to grade this one because it’s set in a parallel universe. The show hardly focuses on ethnicity or Latinidad — except for one character who doesn’t have Proof of Existence because he’s from far away (played by Bernardo Valasco) — and his storyline feels purposeful. Judging by the messages of Fantasmas, Torres seems to be critical of what Hollywood dubs “representation,” so while the cast is extremely diverse — there are people of color, gender-diverse people, queer people — Torres might be doing his own version of representation and that’s necessary, too.
Language: F
There wasn’t any code-switching or language-switching, but I think this would be difficult to do in addition to everything else Torres accomplishes here.
Race: A
Fantasmas has one of the most diverse casts I’ve seen in a while. There are many Black and brown characters. (Chester, the self-professed chauffeur, played by Tomas Matos, is one of my favorites.)
Gender & Sexuality: A
There are many queer, trans, and gender-diverse characters who work really, really well together. Also, Torres explores his own queerness, which I really loved to watch. You can read the whole show as a metaphor for existing as a queer person, as a person who is outside the norm and doesn’t want to submit to the regular rules of existence.
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Stereotypes & Tropes: A
Film schools should study the way Torres’ scriptwriting turns the world on its head.
Was it Actually Good? A
It was awesome. I laughed out loud often; it left me thinking about how silly we are as humans.
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