Julio Torres’s World Is a Gay Synesthesia Millennial Adventure
‘Fantasmas’ delivers quintessential Torres, with characters as colorful as the sets they inhabit.
Months after the premiere of the A24 feature Problemista, Julio Torres graces our screens again with another personal and surreal project, this time a tale in six episodes.
Don’t be fooled by his young looks — the auteur and star of the new Max series Fantasmas has plenty of industry experience to back him up, including the Fred Armisen-produced series Los Espookys and the HBO comedy special My Favorite Shapes by Julio Torres.
The SNL alum is an unstoppable tour guide of the otherworldly, reimagining reality through an alien-like gaze with both naivetè and the matter-of-fact confidence of a child, not yet limited by the rules of adulthood.
Needless to say, he’s an Aquarius.
The set pieces, wardrobe, and make-up immerse us in the theatrical and remind us of the never-ending performative nature of existence. His work never strikes for hyper-realism, and in an era where CGI graphics bore us with 3-D attempts to mimic our surroundings, he delivers us the opposite. Yet, in all the intentional artificiality lies reality, enhanced.
He presents magical realism in a modern landscape and juxtaposes it with his deadpan humor, as if placing Demetri Martin in the “It’s a Small World” Disney ride.
There are universes within the mundane, and no one knows that better than Torres.
In the first episode, there is an entire segment devoted to a personified letter Q, and how it feels misunderstood by normie letters such as Cs and Os. That odd segue reminds us of a trademark of his work — the ode to the misfit. The creative, the immigrant, the outsider. He represents the one whose mind others may never understand — and he makes it understandable.
Writers always wonder about the perspectives of the characters they write. Julio explores the perspective of the characters, the setting, the words, the smells and colors, the shapes and the vestiments. He sees the world in its fragments and through exploration of points of view we wouldn’t think of inquiring, he makes it whole.
Everything is alive. Colors have emotions. A cactus can feel the ghosts of the cacti that once occupied its vessel.
Because he sees the complexity of every molecule around us, he sees the flaw in attempting to simplify the unsimplifiable. To try to place us in government-issued boxes, standardized bureaucracy, and soulless corporations is moot, and he explores that in both Problemista and Fantasmas with his tireless brand of absurd humor.
Although Julio Torres has stated that he is not seeking to represent every single immigrant, gay, or Hispanic reality, his experiences color his worlds with authenticity.
In Fantasmas, I was pleased to notice a lack of heteronormativity. In most shows, the creators and audience alike assume that characters are cishet, but Fantasmas feels just the opposite. Queerness is naturally woven into the fabric of the series in a way that comes off as natural, genuine, and casual. It’s how representation should look like, and how it can be, in the hands of the right artist.
I can’t get enough of this Salvadorian creative! His work is idiosyncratic, refreshing, and as a fellow queer Latinx Aquarius, it’s inspiring.
With Fantasmas, he blesses our screens with more of his imaginative worldview and absurdist approaches to everything. I know that the show doesn’t need promoting on my little Medium blog, but go watch it on Max. New episodes on Fridays.
