In the visually mystic, rain-drenched frames of Jeo Baby’s Kaathal, and the visceral, urban decay of his contemporary work Ebb, the screen functions as a high-resolution microscope. These films are not merely “socially conscious” dramas about the inclusion of homosexuality or the complexities of polyamory. They are far more radical. They are forensic investigations into the “fractured self”- a study of the human psyche shattering under the weight of a modern civilization that has perfected the art of policing the human body and soul.
Through these narratives, we encounter a fundamental philosophical crisis: a “schizophrenic” split that occurs when innate human instinct collides with the rigid, internalised dictates of religion, state, and family. In these stories, “schizophrenia” ceases to be a medical diagnosis and becomes a social condition- a lived reality of division where the authentic self is exiled to a silent interior, while a hollow, performative self (self with a mask) navigates the world. In Kaathal, the authentic self is Mathew’s love for another man. It’s his instinctual, authentic truth. In Ebb, this is the man’s complex desire for open, non-traditional relationships. In both films, the performative self is imposed by society, with roots in the heteronormative, monogamous family system. To understand this psychic schism, we must look toward the intersecting frameworks of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, the “schizo-analysis” of Deleuze and Guattari, and Judith Butler’s theories on the linguistic limits of the “livable life.”
The Biopolitical Prison: Administering the “Normal” Body
To decode the tragedy of Mathew Devassy in Kaathal, one must first understand the architecture of his cage. Michel Foucault’s concept of Biopower offers the foundational perspective. In the pre-modern era, power was “sovereign”- the King had the right to “take life or let live.” But the modern age ushered in “biopower,” a form of authority that aims to “foster life or disallow it to the point of death.” It functions by governing, enhancing, and managing the population’s biological processes.
In Kaathal, the biopolitical machinery is the heteronormative family. The family unit is the state’s primary laboratory; it ensures the “correct” birth rate, the “correct” transfer of property, and the “correct” performance of gender roles. Mathew (played with haunting, stone-faced restraint by Mammootty) is a body being “managed.” His marriage to Omana (Jyothika) is not merely a personal bond; it is a social apparatus. It exists to render him a productive, reproductive, and predictable citizen. His homosexual desire is not just a “sin” in this framework; it is a violent anomaly in the reproductive logic of the state.
Even after the legal decriminalisation of Section 377 and more progressive judicial rulings on homosexuality in India, the “social gaze”- the village community, the Church, and the digital gossip network- acts as a decentralised enforcement mechanism. This is the Village Panopticon. Foucault used the image of the circular prison, where a single guard can observe all prisoners without them knowing whether they are being watched, to describe how modern society internalises surveillance. In the Kerala village, the “guard” is the collective moral conscience of the society. No one can escape the “pastoral gaze” of society. The characters behave as if they are constantly being watched, internalising the norms until they become their own jailers. The gaze that has left the “pastoral source” finds its dwelling in each individual’s body. Mathew’s silence is a survival strategy in a Panopticon where every whisper is a report to the authorities of “the Normal”.
The Exile from Language: Judith Butler and the “Unlivable” Life
The most painful aspect of this biopolitical control is the exile from language. A crucial moment in Kaathal takes place in the silent sterility of a courtroom. When Omana shares her years of overwhelming loneliness, Mathew responds with a blunt defence: “That’s how I am. I don’t speak much”.
This is not a personality trait; it is a philosophical condition. To deconstruct this statement is to realise that Mathew’s silence is not innate but enforced. Philosopher Judith Butler, in Excitable Speech, argues that language constitutes the domain of the “intelligible” and, therefore, the “livable”. If a person lacks the vocabulary to describe their desire- or if that vocabulary is socially weaponised- they become “unintelligible,” a ghost in their own life.
Mathew remains silent because the symbolic order of his community lacks the conceptual framework to “hear” a homosexual voice. To speak his truth would be to utter a sentence with no socially recognised meaning- a confession for which there is no absolution, only erasure. His “I don’t speak much” is the ultimate schizophrenic symptom: a profound split where the authentic self is exiled to a silent interior to protect the physical body from the violence of the “Normal” and epistemological violence of the society.
Deleuzian Flows and the “Desiring-Machine”
If Foucault explains the cage, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explain the explosion. In their seminal work Anti-Oedipus, they argue that human desire is naturally a “flow”- chaotic, multi-directional, and non-linear. They call the human being a “desiring-machine”.
In Ebb, we see a protagonist who attempts a radical “decapsulation” of his desire. His move toward polyamory and a threesome with his wife and her lover is, in Deleuzian terms, an attempt to become a “Body without Organs”- a self that is not organized by rigid social labels or the “monogamous imperative”. Body without Organs (BwO) is not a medical or anatomical state, but a conceptual one. It represents a body that has stripped away its “organs”- not the physical heart, hands or eyes, but the socially imposed functions and “organized” roles we are forced to play (e.g., the “productive citizen,” the “heterosexual male”, “the obedient woman”). The organs are the tools through which society “codes” us. For example, in Kathal, the penis of Mathew Devassy is coded as an organ for reproductive heteronormativity, despite his natural sexual desire being towards a man. When Mathew finally stands in court and accepts the truth, he is taking a Line of Flight. He isn’t just “coming out”; he is “De-coding” himself. He is telling the Church, the Party, and the Village: “I am no longer going to function as your ‘Husband-Machine.’ I am reclaiming my flow.” This is the Breakthrough. He escapes the “Oedipal cage” of being the perfect heteronormal husband and becomes a Full Body without Organs- a body that is finally free to define its own functions. In Ebb, the protagonist tries to become a BwO and let his desire flow like a Rhizome, spreading in all directions.
However, Deleuzian logic warns that this “schizo-process” (the breaking of social codes) may become dangerous. It can lead to two divergent results:
- The Breakthrough: Where the individual successfully escapes “molar” (rigid) structures to find a new, liberated way of being as Mathew wanted himself to be in the Kathal.
- The Breakdown: Where the self, lacking the psychological or social infrastructure to sustain such “un-coded” desire, shatters as the protagonist finally falls in the Ebb.
In Ebb, the experiment is not driven by a coherent alternative ethos, but by a desperate effort to hold a disintegrating world together. The result is a catastrophic breakdown. The protagonist’s psychogenic impotence is a literal “somatic mutiny”- the body’s refusal to function as a machine for the state when the unified “self” needed for that performance has been fractured beyond repair.
The Somatic Mutiny: When the Body Screams
Foucault reminds us that the body is the primary site of biopolitical inscription. In Ebb, when the psyche can no longer bridge the gap between “innate instinct” and “internalized norm,” the body takes over. The protagonist’s impotence and his subsequent compulsive, detached sexual encounters are not merely personal failures; they are the physical manifestations of the schizophrenic split.
The film’s climax, the attempted suffocation of his wife, followed by public masturbation, is the schizophrenic break depicted through terrifying symbolism. By attacking his wife, he attacks the core figure of the biopolitical institution (the marital partner) that he perceives as both his anchor and his captor. His subsequent public masturbation represents the final exit from the “Symbolic Order”(the laws and customs of the society). He is no longer a husband, a lover, or even a citizen. He has become a fragmented mass of drives, instincts, acting out in a regressive, asocial vacuum. This is the conclusion of the schizophrenia born from unresolved contradiction: the self, unable to reconcile code and instinct, disintegrates into autoerotic isolation.
The Lexical Void: Havelock Ellis and the Name
This exile into silence and madness is aggravated by a historical “lexical gap”. The pioneering Physician and researcher of human sexual behaviour, Havelock Ellis, aimed to name and normalise homosexual desire as “sexual inversion, a congenital instinct rather than a moral pathology. Ellis’s goal was to bring this instinct into language, into the realm of scientific discourse, where it could be debated and understood.
Yet, in the world of Kaathal, Ellis’s vocabulary has never reached the village of Mathew. Mathew’s instinct lacks a recognized term within his social language. He is trapped in a discursive void. For him, neither the traditional language of “sin” nor the modern language of “identity politics” feels authentic. He exists in a pre-linguistic or in an extra-linguistic space where desire is a haunting rather than an identity. In Ebb, the polyamorous instinct lacks even this emerging taxonomy, leaving the protagonist in an even deeper wilderness, which accelerates his psychotic collapse.
In both films, the body acts as an archive of suppressed history. Every stiff movement Mammootty makes in Kaathal is a record of decades of suppression of his authentic self. Every jerk and failure of the protagonist in Ebb is a record of a failed rebellion. These films suggest that while the mind can be partitioned and the tongue silenced, the body remembers. The “schizophrenic” split is, at its heart, a conflict between a mind that tries to obey and a body that cannot help but feel.
Capitalism and the Overcoding of Desires
The relationship between capitalism and schizophrenia is evident in the film Ebb. According to Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism is inherently a schizophrenic system. It simultaneously offers promises of liberation (Deterritorialization) while constructing even more terrifying new prisons (Reterritorialization). The film Ebb is a visual manifestation of this theoretical truth.
In the Deleuzian sense, “innate desire” is an unrestricted flow of energy emanating from within an individual. In Ebb, the protagonist’s true desire might be to experience his love and sexuality more deeply. However, this desire is never born in a vacuum. The capitalist environment in which he lives has pasted certain “labels” onto this innate desire.
The Capitalist Market transforms sexuality and relationships into commodities (products to be consumed) rather than mere emotions. The path of the “threesome” chosen by the protagonist is not actually something that originated spontaneously from within him. Instead, it is a fantasy constructed inside him by the porn industry, “liberal” cinema, and the market’s call to “be modern.”
The protagonist’s wish to share his partner with someone else is not an act of revolution, but an attempt to acquire a product labeled as an “exotic experience” provided by the market. Here, sexuality ceases to be an emotion shared between two individuals and turns into a curiosity – commodity to be “tried out.” Porn culture and the market overcode his innate desires. He is not trying to be a liberator; he is trying to be a “consumer” of the market. Capitalism makes him believe the “threesome” was his own original idea. In reality, the market provided the script, the imagery, and the “modern” justification for it. He is a passive consumer who believes he is an active rebel.
The foundation of capitalism is competition. Observe the sense of inferiority the protagonist experiences after the threesome in Ebb. Instead of viewing sexuality as a shared experience, he views it as a competition over who is more “potent.” The fear that his wife’s lover “performed” better than him is the result of capitalism transforming sexuality into a productive machine. Here, sexuality is reduced to a “scorecard.”
Between Utterance and Annihilation
The power of Jio Baby’s cinema lies in tracing these two divergent paths from the same schizophrenic condition. Together, Kaathal and Ebb form a powerful dialectic of the human soul.
Kaathal concludes with the hard-won utterance- the crack in the silence through which a new, fragile self might emerge. Mathew’s eventual declaration in court is a “Breakthrough.” It is a violent, painful disruption of the performative script, an assertion of an existence that no longer requires the legitimization of the Village Panopticon.
Ebb follows the darker trajectory of annihilation. It ends not in the destruction of the physical body, but in the total evaporation of the socially integrated self. It demonstrates that the weight of contradiction can lead not to speech, but to a violent, bodily scream of dysfunction.
In the space between Mathew’s courtroom testimony and the solitary, shattered act that ends Ebb, Jio Baby explores the extreme dangers of existence at the margins of the biopolitical order. He asks us a haunting question: Can the “queer self” find a language and survive? Or is the price of “normality” the very coherence of the human soul? These films suggest that until the biopolitical cage is dismantled, many will remain trapped in that unbearable silence, where the only way to be “true” is to break.
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