A decade ago, the late science fiction legend Ursula K. LeGuin gave an acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. One sentence in particular escaped the confines of that address and proliferated around the internet: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.”
Less discussed, though, was the broader context of the quote, namely LeGuin’s concerns about the increasing commodification of art. The sentence immediately preceding that iconic quote is: “Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art.”
This is the core tension at the heart of Fantasmas, the latest surreal comedy from writer-director Julio Torres. The six-episode series, which airs new installments on Max every Friday, features the comedian playing a creative, also named Julio, trying to make it in a version of New York City in which the power of capitalism is somehow even more inescapable than it is in real life. The show is imbued with Torres’ characteristic absurdism. Over the course of the first four episodes, we learn the history of “the first gay hamster nightclub,” Julio pays $500 for a social media consultation from a tiny Smurf-like creature (that ends up being useless), and a chihuahua trapped in a cursed portrait forces his owner to lure twinks to his apartment via Grindr so that it can feed on their life force. (That last episode, fittingly, is called “Looking4Twinks2S**k.”)
But for all of its idiosyncrasies, the New York City of Fantasmas is really not that different from the real-world Big Apple, or really any city. Yes, the “Proof of Existence” that is required of the people inhabiting the world of Fantasmas is ridiculous — but then, so is the REAL ID that exists in this world, which has been criticized by civil rights organizations for its potential impacts on undocumented immigrants and its strengthening of a national surveillance state.
In another uncanny moment, the performance artist Vanesja (played by real-life artist Martine Gutierrez) — who has spent so long “in character” as Julio’s agent that she has ended up as his actual agent — tries to get her “client” to agree to appear in a credit card commercial. To add insult to injury, the gig would require Julio to wear “a rainbow pride suit… and a sombrero… and maracas,” which seems unbelievable until you realize rainbow credit cards do indeed exist.
In general, Torres’ comedy excels in building out seemingly simple concepts to absurd effect. For example, the logline for Fantasmas reveals only that Julio is on a quest to find a lost golden oyster earring, but the series keeps pulling on that narrative thread until the whole thing unravels into something much stranger. By taking the bureaucratic logics that govern our world and stretching them to their extremes, Fantasmas lays bare with devastating clarity the absurdity — and the profound emptiness — at the heart of American society.
The series does this most poignantly when it lampoons the ways in which capitalism both subsumes and shapes our identities, especially in the era of media “representation” and personal branding. It does not seem like a coincidence that Torres and the character he plays in Fantasmas share a first name. Both Julios are artists in New York City who undoubtedly must navigate the complexities of whether to take branded work, whether to accept positions in writers’ rooms that they’re offered solely for the sake of being diverse tokens, and whether they should commodify their selfhood for stability. One character, Chester (Tomás Matos), does this literally: they’re the proprietor of a rideshare app also called Chester, and we never see them outside of the driver’s seat as they bus Julio around town.
The shared first name between Torres and the character he plays is only one of many aspects of the show that blurs the line between reality and fiction. In one episode, Julio crosses paths with Skyler (Jaboukie Young-White), a TikTok creator who addresses his adoring followers with the phrase, “Hi little consumers!” (Torres frequently uses the same phrase on his own Instagram, as he did in this February post promoting his feature film Problemista, which he referred to as “incoming product.”) Notably, the names of actual companies are used throughout the show, rather than using obvious parodies. (There is a thinly veiled reference to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in episode four, though, which is probably my favorite vignette in the show thus far.) Whether the show is examining influencers or obsessive fandoms, Fantasmas always comes back to the utter meaninglessness of much of the “content” we consume.
I don’t know if I have watched anything that captures the contradictions of life under late capitalism quite as well as Fantasmas, especially as it pertains to being a queer person of color working in media. (Ultimately, even this article is content that I have created for the purpose of generating revenue, but hopefully it was enjoyable to read anyway, little reader.) Yet as bleak as Fantasmas is, it also feels strangely hopeful. Yes, it’s impossible to escape the hellish maze of commodified identity and the content-ification of art, which is a given in both real life and Fantasmas. But that doesn’t make the things that we create within that maze less meaningful. Honestly, the fact that Fantasmas exists at all, on a streamer like Max no less, feels like nothing short of a miracle. (As NPR producer Isabella Gomez Sarmiento put it in a recent episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour, “This is so brilliant, but, like, how did they give him the money to do this?”)
In LeGuin’s 2014 speech, the author issued a prediction: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.” Through Fantasmas, the most fully realized version of his vision yet, Torres is rapidly proving himself to be one of those writers and artists, a painter of a larger reality.
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