“A Little Limited”
Authors: Blackwood Gemma , Juliff Toby 
Published: November 2024

Right from the start of HBO’s surreal new sketch comedy Fantasmas (2024), we are confronted by the “ghosts” of the show’s title. The work of Salvadorean-American comedian, actor, and writer Julio Torres, Fantasmas constructs a highly artificial set of digital hauntings that, this article argues, speaks to and through a Latin experience that conjures unresolved tensions of displacement and exile, as well as raising probing questions about human agency and identity in an era of globalised neoliberalism. Torres has also given his own explanation for the use of the term in his show:

all the people in the show are a little limited, and that’s where the idea of them being ghostly comes from, them being fantasmas [the Spanish word for ghosts]. I don’t lean into that title for its spookiness, I lean into it for the idea of being lonely and having things that people can and cannot do. I’ve always loved the rules around the mythology of ghosts: You can’t talk to that person; you can’t leave this house. That’s exciting to me, feeling a little invisible. (O’Falt 2024)

Yet here, we find that objects and concepts can be ghosts as well, not only people, and ideas of artificiality are used deliberately in the show’s storytelling to emphasise a site of haunting. The constructed artifice of life is presented through different ghostly technologies in Fantasmas. There is Julio’s “very important talent agent” Vanesja, who is really a performance artist in the role for so long that now she finds herself doing “regular agent stuff”. There is Julio’s TikTok influencer friend Skyler, who becomes possessed by a demonic Algorithm (another type of artifice) and loses all humanness in his desire to remain relevant on social media. There is the New York City set itself, constructed on an open sound studio, its Brechtian forms emphasising transitory moments and temporariness. Meanwhile, Julio’s personal assistant robot Bibo is more human than some of the show’s main personalities, chastising Julio for “gaslighting”. The human and non-human characters of the show take on synthetic personas whilst refusing the divide of the self and other, rendering the characters as “ghosts” (which we explore in detail later). Julio, as the protagonist of the show, is the one character who strains to keep his identity—he actively tries to avoid getting a “proof of existence” card throughout the series—even as he finds his persona is highly coveted and at all points at risk of being commodified.
In the opening scene of the show’s comedic odyssey through New York, Julio finds himself the creative lead in a consultation with Crayola, in which he presents the necessity of a new clear colour crayon that signifies “the in-between”. “But clear isn’t a colour!”, the Crayola execs rebuke. “If it isn’t a colour, then what do you call this?” Julio asks, gesturing to the air between the management side of the table and the consultant. “What do you call what?” they question. “The space between us. The emotional space, I mean”, Julio responds. When the Crayola team suggest that it can’t be done (“Why are you doing this? Why do you need this?”), Julio reminds them of the glass of water in front of them:

it’s already done. Some things aren’t one of the normal colours or play by the rules of the rainbow. Think about air or smells or … or memory. Shouldn’t they be allowed to be colours? … To colour something clear is to re-imagine colouring as we know it.

While not entirely convinced, as the Crayola executives usher Julio from the meeting, they ask what they might call this clear Crayola. “Oh, um, call it ‘Fantasmas’.” / “Fantasmas?” / “It means ‘ghosts’”. Julio leaves conceding the final plural “s” to the executive: ghost—not ghosts. Yet, from there the opening title FANTASMA appears, with a defiant “S” appearing shortly afterwards, which signals the plurality of the ghosts that will continue to haunt Torres for the remainder of the season, in this dream-like show that in the words of one reviewer “presents itself as a narrative series, but really, it is more of a sketch show, with a series of mini film-like interludes bound together by the loosest of threads” (Nicholson).
As the surreal Crayola pitch makes clear, what takes place is also a blurring of the concept of “ghosts” between human subjects and objects, which speaks to the reification of human subjectivity under capitalism, but also of the magical potential of boundary-dissolving as new identities are produced or created. This Spanish word for “ghosts” evokes the word “fantasy” in English—and in the show, the idea of procrastinatory dreams and reverie as a way of escaping anxious reality remains a constant theme. The show innovates on the formal conventions of sketch comedy in interesting temporal ways to further this concept, with the move to a new sketch as Julio has a change of thought or wants to focus on a particular idea. And, to continue this fluidity of subjective viewpoint, Julio’s ideas and fantasies mix with the reflections of other characters—and so a sketch about why Julio thinks the letter Q is too early in the alphabet is followed quickly by a schoolteacher’s musings on graffiti of a backward-facing penis in the school’s toilets.
The Crayola headquarters parodies the classic Sesame Street (1981) television segment “how crayons are made”, which shows a young girl using a crayon to conjure up the means of production in a folksy, small-scale Crayola factory (and against the grain, Crayola crayons are still produced in American factories, unlike many industries that have relocated to the global south). An ambivalence is constructed around this idea of collaboration with major industry, which seems to link to Julio’s concern in the series that he is selling out his uniquely creative vision to corporate America. The series leaves this concern as a permanent question, but the play with ideas about the culture industry—and Julio’s role as a kind of imagineer “thinking outside the box” for these high-level corporate executives—leads to a parody of American “dream factories”, which can certainly be extended to Hollywood and television networks such as HBO, with their search for distinctiveness.
While the show is darkly humorous—Vinson Cunningham for The New Yorker suggests, the show “is strange and sorrowful, but it’s also deeply funny in a way that series with overt political messages rarely manage to be”—an eeriness is also produced as an affect by the show. As Mark Fisher notes in an analysis of eerie texts, capital contains a ghostliness and “is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity” (5) and that ideas of the eerie are tied up with bigger questions about agency:

‘we’ ‘ourselves’ are caught up in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces. There is no inside except as a folding of the outside; the mirror cracks, I am an other, and I always was. (5)

Fantasmas plays out these concerns using the figure of Julio as a guide through such disturbances: while Torres has the agency to name the crayon, he is still unable to escape the “non-human forces” of the system, which for him requires proof of identity (a clear metaphor for the legitimate immigration allowed by a US Visa, a recurring idea in Torres’s work, and a central focus of the A24 film Problemista, 2024). Julio’s recurring nightmare of being trapped in a collapsing room—where he is dressed like a cross between harlequin Pierrot and David Bowie in the Ashes to Ashes video—is just one of the many European avant-garde references that evokes twentieth-century aesthetics. This places the show within a high-brow comedic tradition characterised as “satirical, ironic, less exuberant and more avant-garde” and which “prioritises a cerebral and distanced perspective on beauty over the search for direct enjoyment and immediate entertainment” (Claessens and Dhoest 53). This highbrow modality and focus on Torres as an auteur showrunner and artist also fulfills the content requirements of HBO, known for its “prestige” comedy shows with the same cultural status given to indie cinema (Newman). In this highbrow mode, Adi Walker has argued that Torres’s humour is cerebrally produced “in the space ‘behind the joke’”, and actually is aimed at providing commentary on “the US itself and its structural conditions” (145).
The space behind the joke can be potent. For Torres, who grew up in the final years of the Salvadorean Civil War, born to a Venezuelan mother and who spent formative time in Brazil, the “fantasmas” of the title have a peculiarly Latin quality that speaks more broadly to a “zone of experience” that would appear as the fictionalised country of Los Espookys (2019-2022), Torres’s first Spanish-language comedy series, also made for HBO. And, as has been argued before, the Latin experiences of the late twentieth century—Chile, Columbia, El Salvador, Argentina, Paraguay, Guatemala—, if not interchangeable with one another, speak of a shared “colonial aphasia” and “colonial agnosia” that Adriana Zavala has argued generated a condition that is “simultaneously known and unknown, resisting a method of apprehension and instead ruminating on the interstices between knowledge and ignorance, reflecting on the relationship between production, loss, and disassociation” (Zavala 8).
These Latin exiles serve as a defence against uncomplicated “exileness” by continually substituting sites of memory—in Los Espookys, real-life production filming decisions meant that Columbia stood in for El Salvador’s site of exile, Chile stood in for Columbia, etc. (Marez). Similarly, in Fantasmas, the continued shifts of temporality and landscape and mix of Latin and Latinx cast speak to the complexities of that shared and unshareable experience of exile, substitutions, and conjuring. As mentioned, Torres also talks about the “exciting” aspect of being a ghost—of being able to hide and to be invisible—and perhaps a connection from this statement can be drawn to the large “undocumented” population of Hispanic-origin immigrants residing in the United States (Ruggles et al. suggest that 7.4 million people are currently undocumented in America). The multiplicity of Latin lives currently invisible to the government in the US arguably also constitute the imaginary “fantasmas” of the show, enlivening the politics of this Brechtian take on Manhattan. As Adi Walker has suggested about the comedian’s earlier work, “Torres plays a crucial role in using comedy to reorient the collectively engaged attention economy to underappreciated, rendered invisible labour that persists in the background” (148), and this is certainly also true of Fantasmas, for highlighting small details in immigrant labour in the United States.
The study of ghosts—as a critical and historical term—dwells on what French-Algerian thinker Jacques Derrida has termed a “hauntology”. Working from and beyond Sigmund Freud’s work on mourning—taking typically Derridean detours through Martin Heidegger and South African politics of apartheid—hauntology is “the persistence of a present past or the return of the dead which the worldwide work of mourning cannot get rid of” (Derrida 101). Hauntology, as articulated within critical and cultural theory, has a focus on discursively unpicking seen absences and unseen presences. Or, perhaps more plainly, the unresolved question of presentness. It is then a position that insists that the “other side of life is not always death” and that there remain absences that present themselves to us in search of or demanding justice. For Derrida, his study in hauntology begins in the immediate post-Apartheid moment of South Africa in which “disappeared” peoples return to demand justice in the present. A spectral residue or ghostly presence of those who have disappeared, but nor are they—legally in many cases—fully dead.
For Derrida then, the ghost’s failure to rest is characteristic of a deconstruction that “suggests that what we have is not sufficient and warns that we are not fully in control, that we have not taken everything to account. It speaks to a hesitation” (Zacharias 104). Within Fantasmas—and perhaps in the context of this examination of Latin American experience more broadly—these hesitations of voice (“um, err, … “), the show’s artificial landscapes (incomplete sound sets and scaffolded sets), and the existential journeys of the show’s main characters speak to the endless deferral of rest. Those that are absent but never fully dead, speak to many shared experiences of absent voices in the Latin experience. And, as considered by a broad range of scholars, the Latin experience is one haunted by multiple absences: thousands of los desaparecidos (disappeared youth), mass student disappearances, and countless political exiles. And if the critical high point of hauntology occurred at the end of the long twentieth century, within the Latin/a/x context, the diasporic and exiled communities of a broad range of peoples have sustained such resonances, continuing with work in visual art (Doris Salcedo, Cecilia Vicuna), music (Jorge Martin), and television comedy (Julio Torres, Fred Armisen).
These spectral subjects speak to a different condition to that of other ghosts and instead speak to sets of political exiles and the returning of the disappeared. The ghosts of Fantasmas evoke the conjuring of the unresolvable tensions of exile that speak to a geo-political trauma of displaced peoples, juntas, mass gravesites, and murders that—entangled with colonial histories of traumas against its indigenous peoples and languages—continued well into the twenty-first century and, even post-Castro, mark out a shared and unshared experience of diaspora and unreturnings. In the show, the constructed and Brechtian Manhattan as a location of confluence for multiple Latin/a/x stories, and the show’s many otherworldly parodies of lost television—such as MELF, an alternative version of 1980s sitcom ALF—become potent sites for these unresolvable questions of exile and loss.
For Juliff and Tierney, responding to the psychoanalytic signalling of Latin absence calls on the work of Torok that hauntings take place within a language of presentness rather than mourning: “the ghost refuses to occupy a position within the established binaries through which we are accustomed to constructing our identities and interpreting experience … . It is neither dead nor alive, past nor present. The ghost is always a revenant because it begins by coming back” (Juliff and Tierney 37). It signals, therefore, a perpetual process that has neither beginning nor end: “it has no point of departure and no moment of arrival. It is irreducible and undecidable” (Juliff and Tierney 37).
For Hentyle Yapp—a leading voice in queer transnational studies of race and culture—the dizzying array of temporal shifts in cultural production marks “the dissipation of sense [that] pushes us to develop a minoritarian ethic around expiration and return, difference and repetition” (Yapp 7). The continuing failure of the ghost to rest upon a known time and place is one that speaks to the necessity of Torres to return (a large proportion of Julio’s exposition takes place in a ride-share travelling back to an apartment that he never seems to arrive back to), expiration (of dates relating to medical insurance cards), and endless returns. As Rossi has argued, Torres’s combination of “distinctly queer aesthetics and immigrant ethos” is deeply subversive for American television, especially “when political rhetoric and invisibility in Hollywood has led to the racialization of Central American migrants as dangerous gang members and unworthy of the U.S.’s sympathy” (368).
Derrida’s ghost, and its haunting presence in absence, suggests that just as the meaning we seek to convey through language constantly escapes along an endless chain of signifiers, so collective and individual histories, and the art practices embedded in them, are less sealed off than we might imagine. The return of the ghost complicates, in other words, the opposition of presence versus absence, visibility versus invisibility, memory versus forgetting, the taken-for-granted linearity of the connections between past, present, and future, as well as the way in which art addresses us. Derrida’s ghost, unlike French psychanalyst Maria Torok’s “transgenerational phantom”, does not return to reveal a secret. However, by unfixing meaning, it re-opens the door to history’s unfinished business, making visible some of the costs of modernity in its various guises.
From the first episode, Julio is faced with an uncertainty of status. Asked to provide proof of his existence—the document of proof required is never stated, so remains existential—he cannot provide anything other than a childhood exemption from sport provided by his absent mother. Across the series, Julio tries to locate workarounds, loopholes, and alternatives for the proof of existence (usually in the form of half-heartedly selling out to large corporations). He remains surreally unable to obtain proof that he does indeed exist, and instead can only hope for documents that prove another existence. Fantasmas’ Julio is no refugee, but he remains, as many in the Latin zone of experience, burdened by the necessity of proof of identity that exile demands. That proof, like the spectre, has an expiration date.
Fantasmas speaks of a haunting of the Latin experience, one that is marked out by dislocations, exiles, and undeterminable landscapes. There is a deliberate hesitation to name places and to set out the interior scenes in any realistic manner, with most scenes taking place on a series of highly artificial sound studio sets, representing a mythic Manhattan. The show’s lead character, who is on an odyssey to locate a lost earring, moves across sets and scenes that appear unparticular and dislocated. The “real” earring of the quest, a synecdoche of identity perhaps, remains unfound, just as Julio never quite resolves his identity or his location, caught endlessly moving through an urban landscape that is neither one place or another.
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