Beyond the Genre: The Psychic Performance of Masculinity in the Karthik Subbaraj Universe

This paper looks at the movies of the Tamil director Karthik Subbaraj (like Jigarthanda and Iraivi) using two main lenses: how movies are made (postmodernism) and how the mind works (psychoanalytic theory). The central idea is that Subbaraj has a unique style because he uses a brilliant combination: he actively breaks down traditional movie genres and storytelling rules, which creates the perfect, unstable space to seriously study the troubled inner lives of his male characters. By blurring the line between what's "real" in the story and what's just a performance (meta-cinema), he destabilizes what we expect from Tamil cinema. This process exposes the deep-seated fears, insecurities, and self-destructive urges the "psychic journey" of his leading men.The analysis pinpoints two key examples which are Jigarthanda's self-aware structure and Iraivi's raw and unresolved drama.Both films act as a double critique: challenging the conventions of filmmaking itself and criticizing toxic masculinity.