Julio Torres’s “Fantasmas” Finds Truth in Fantasy

Early in the first episode of the brilliantly allegorical new HBO show “Fantasmas,” written and directed by the thirty-seven-year-old comedian and writer Julio Torres, an artist also named Julio—quirky and creative, soft-spoken and slightly sad—is making an informal presentation to a crayon company. He wants to make a crayon that is perfectly clear. If you used it on a piece of paper, nobody but you would know that your marks existed. Your sentence or drawing or deeply coded message would stay hidden forever. The executive he’s pitching sounds intrigued by the weird idea. Julio wants to name this new “color” “fantasmas,” but the exec thinks he should drop the “S.” It’s just one crayon, after all. This fleeting bit makes for a zany opening, one that prepares you for the bizarre precision of Torres’s vision. He likes surreal situations and befuddling outcomes. Nothing in the work he makes—including the show “Los Espookys,” which he co-created and starred in, and his film from last year, “Problemista”—is ever quite straightforward. He’s clearly writing under the influence of the world we all share, but he filters its details through an odd, fertile, conscience-stricken imagination, downbeat but full of saturated color. In 2019, Torres released a comedy special called “My Favorite Shapes,” in which he stood behind a conveyor belt as various toylike items glided before him, one by one, and he imbued them with anthropomorphic verve, offering, along the way, a veiled story of his life as a Salvadoran immigrant. In “Fantasmas,” the clear crayon—there but not there—is a witty symbolic key to the show’s serious themes. Lots of other things about Julio’s life are like this: sort of perceptible, but only if you know where and how to look. He has a manager named Vanesja, for instance, played by the mononymic artist Martine. The “J” in her name is silent. We learn early on that she’s really a performance artist intensely immersed in the work of playing his manager, but she’s so lost in the role that nobody, not even Julio, can really tell the difference. She’s a sharky, brassy business […]

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