Life in the Doll's House
On Julio Torres's new series, Fantasmas
The easy thing to say about Fantasmas, the new TV series from Julio Torres, is that it’s timely. As a Salvadoran living in New York, Julio (played by Torres) is in a sudden bind. His landlord has terminated his lease and he must find somewhere else to live. To do this, he must obtain “proof of existence” – a certificate one needs to get a job, rent an apartment, and even ride the subway. Most of the people in Julio’s life already have it, and don’t understand why it’s so difficult for him to obtain. His manager, Vanesja (“with a J”), informs him that he can always become “an exception” and bypass the need for proof of existence. Social media influencers are exceptions, she says, as are actors – and famous people generally. She offers him an opportunity: Do this one credit card advertisement and he’ll become an exception. All he has to do is wear a rainbow jumpsuit, she says – “and a sombrero.”
It’s also possible that the birthmark beneath Julio’s ear has changed shape or size, and to verify this he must locate a lost earring – a diamond oyster – that was, he insists, exactly the same shape and size as the birthmark. Without the earring as a demonstration and without proof of existence, no doctor will perform a biopsy. Nor can Julio “upload” his consciousness and let his body die without this proof, and so his choice – debase himself and obtain proof of existence, find this oyster (lost at the bottom of the sea), or succumb to a potential cancer – is life, lottery, or death.
Fantasmas is full of this kind of allegory, lightly done – all in a universe that seems just one universe over from our own. Full of influencers, rideshare drivers, food deliverers, aspiring actors, and a great wealth of background characters (an elf whose harassment lawsuit against Santa has gone to a televised trial is only one example), it’s a rich sandbox for the kind of critical play that
mentions in a recent essay in Granta. “The turn to political economy in the academy and the intellectual press after the financial crisis,” he writes, “created a sense that every sector of society was in need of materialist analysis.” This is how literary criticism, in Lorentzen’s particular example, has gone “in flight from the literary, in favor of the personal, the political, or, more often, the consumerist and careerist,” and why so many new novels (as well as movies and TV shows) are evaluated and discussed in a sociopolitical rather than an artistic register. Elementally, this kind of shift places content at the center of its study (or curiosity), and relegates form to the occasional offhand remark – if not an outright subject of derision (form as “elitism” when content is “democratic”). This imbalance makes any discussion of style, which is how form and content shape and propel one another, unfairly difficult – unfair because art is style.
Indeed, it’s much harder to say Fantasmas is a work of art – though it’s correct to say it. Yes, the show is rich in its scathingly, accurately absurdist sociopolitical critique; yes, we see ourselves in its relentless surreality because our own world is surreal; but its style is so much more than its politics. Torres was a writer for Saturday Night Live before becoming New Yorker profile–famous with his comedy special, My Favorite Shapes. Then, HBO picked up two seasons of Los Espookys, a bilingual absurdist comedy that introduced Torres’s now familiar narrative aesthetic. This aesthetic reached its largest audience just this year with the theatrical release of Problemista, a film that shares a lot of its themes with Fantasmas but adheres to a more traditional narrative arc – less dispersed, less episodic. In all of these projects, Torres has been something of a miniaturist – pausing on an object or a person or a situation and letting the details accrete until this small, once insignificant part of life seems immeasurably interesting. In Fantasmas, this talent is on full display.
Early in Santiago José Sanchez’s debut novel, Hombrecito, we learn of “the boy” that an early life loneliness is “the beginning of his voyeurism.” This tendency to watch returns again and again through the novel, and sometimes comes to seem as a stand-in for, generally, the novelist’s condition: The novelist’s loneliness is voyeurism. It’s a voyeurism that reminded me of the vignettes in Fantasmas, which carry a writer’s charged longing to know more about the incidental or background people in one’s life – to imagine them after you’ve come into contact with them, to make them “more real” by embellishing their lives. I call Torres’s vignettes miniatures because they seem charged with an exaggerated degree of attention, a magnifying glass that loves to linger. There’s something of love in this activity, as Bachelard points out in The Poetics of Space – a fidelity in “describing” so “minutely,” in “enclos[ing] an entire spectacle in a molecule.” Indeed, as Bachelard says, “Values become condensed in miniature.”
In Fantasmas, the first of these dioramas comes, fittingly, by way of television. A sitcom called Melf, which exists in the show’s alternate universe, appears onscreen. The plot is familiar: a furry alien with an enormous appetite joins a family that lives among laughtracks. The father promises the mother that he and Melf will clean up one of Melf’s many late-night messes in the kitchen, and sends her to bed. It’s then that this silly, satirical vignette shifts: Melf and the sitcom father are in love, their passionate affair coming to a head. “Melf wants the house,” he soon tells his wife. They divorce. Years pass. His estranged child visits a bland and bleak apartment. They want nothing to do with Melf, but the father insists they remain a family. Suddenly, all is made right when Melf promises to make an old favorite, “cookies and spaghetti.” This “glimpse” into a television show eats several minutes out of the first episode of Fantasmas, and tugs the viewer in two directions. The show’s pacing has indicated that we should have moved on by now, but the interest in these metafictional characters is so compassionate, so complete, and so absurd that we don’t want to leave them. Torres does this throughout Fantasmas, building universe after universe from the smallest characters or most incidental instances – a vacant influencer experiencing a living death when a personified Algorithm appears in a mirror and casts him out of favor; a fitness instructor who loses his sense of self when Julio tells him that they don’t need a rope to jump in place; the letter Q, whose radical nonconformity “comes too early in the alphabet,” plays much-booed avant-garde music in dive bars and subway platforms, paves the way for a generation of younger letters (W, X, Y, Z) whose own “nonconformity” is now embraced by a public whose taste has been primed, knowingly or not, by a neglected and impoverished Q. All fall in unpredictable places within the narrative, and some swerve so deep that the light, absurdist humor takes on more nightmarish or forlorn overtones; some remain disturbing or melancholy long after they’ve passed. Each shuts out the rest of the world, even the world of Fantasmas, until the vignette itself feels like the world in its entirety. “Large issues from small,” as Bachelard puts it, “thanks to liberation from all obligations of dimensions, a liberation that is a special characteristic of the activity of the imagination.” It’s Torres’s great talent to illustrate, for the viewer, how it feels to be so passionately, irrationally interested in the lives of strangers – where they’re going, what they do, who they love, and how they treat themselves, not to mention how the cruelties of the world they all share only accumulate and wear them down. The show itself can feel like a leisurely walk through a gallery of Cornell’s shadow boxes, but without sacrificing its own loose sense of narrative; each of these miniatures belongs where it does because they, as much as anything else, are Julio; they are his character. His exception – his proof of existence – is precisely this will to attention, and the show’s style is this will in action. Like a lot of great art, Fantasmas offers a way of living in the world.
A strange thing about criticism is how easily it can feel like writing marketing copy. This is more evident, I think, in the personal or political (or personal-as-political) approach to criticism that Lorentzen mentions, especially since this way of reading or viewing is networked directly into the way we encounter most artworks (e.g. as products or as “lifestyle”), as well as the way most discourse, shaped as it is by the magazines and social media platforms that host it, invites us to evaluate them. Surrealism, with its anti-hermeneutical project of estrangement, its “dis-relation” and individuation, is the style of capitalism, after all, so why not watch a surreal TV show that “relates,” in apprehensible vignettes, this absurdist isolation? If a movie or book or series can “enhance” our “understanding” of sociopolitics, then surely it’s beneficial for our lifestyle if we consume it. But this same sense of salesmanship is there in the “literary” or “artistic” approach to criticism; in evangelizing how a show like Fantasmas can be – that is, how its style acts upon the viewer or the world – one starts to feel like this public adoration or appreciation is in some sense justification. Writing about this TV show I loved, it’s easy to feel as though I’ve picked up a megaphone in the corner of a room and announced that this comedy is “worth taking seriously.” Which isn’t to say one laughs any differently, taking a thing seriously or enjoying it frivolously, but one does live with it differently, think with it differently. And so the critic’s work becomes a way of talking about lifestyle after all, or even drumming up “proof” that the show “exists” as art. These episodes, I’m supposed to say, are worth your money and your time.
What I like about Fantasmas is its destabilization of this authority, of who gets to authenticate what. Most satire is cynical.1 Most satire says, Don’t trust what they’ve told you – which shifts authority into the hands of the writer or comedian. Torres’s satire (and the universe-next-door of Fantasmas is, I think, satire) is the opposite: a satire of wonder, even of awe. It opens toward the world rather than closes itself off from it, despite the world’s serial cruelties and dehumanizations. “Proof of existence” in such a world isn’t unnecessary, per se: Part of being on Earth is, I think, the daily invitation to prove one’s own existence, but in whatever way and on whatever terms one sees fit. Proving to yourself every day that you exist is the simple work of living. But in Fantasmas that invitation is dispersed, democratized – even radicalized. The world and the people in it can be looked at as closely as you want, and in that attention you confer upon yourself and those around you all the proof you need. If this has to be a sales pitch, I hope you buy it.
This is why satire reached a crisis in the first year of the Trump presidency; once shame disappears from the object of satire, there’s no way to escalate or exaggerate the reality into a cartoon. Reality is the cartoon.