The Money Shot: Economies of Sex, Guns, and Language in Topdog/Underdog

The Money Shot:Economies of Sex, Guns, and Language in Topdog/Underdog1 Myka Tucker-Abramson (bio) In "An Equation for Black People Onstage," playwright Suzan-Lori Parks lays out the difficulty of writing plays about black people without falling into an essentializing "Black Aesthetic." Theatre, she argues, is useful for black people because it "can 'tell it like it is'; 'tell it as it was'; 'tell it as it could be"' (21); and, indeed, Parks's plays are continually exploring the limits and intersections of all three. "[T]he writing is rich," she continues, "because we are not an impoverished people, but a wealthy people fallen on hard times" (21). When we consider this metaphor in light of Parks's well-known dramaturgical focus on black male characters, it becomes a highly charged one. In Topdog/Underdog, for example, Lincoln, a previously married and relatively prosperous hustler, has been left by his wife and is now working in a mall, dressing up as the historical Lincoln; his brother, Booth, has likewise been abandoned by his girlfriend, Grace, and is wholly dependent on Lincoln for money other than what he can make pawning stolen goods. Both characters are in crisis — economically and with respect to their masculinity — and Parks's notion of wealth is both a cause of and a metaphor for the crisis. Held in tension throughout Topdog/Underdog is the relationship between the personal psychodramas of the two brothers and the larger issues of economics, race, and masculinity. In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson famously articulated the split between modernism and postmodernism in Lacanian terms as the "breakdown in the signifying chain" (26); in other words, between the Symbol of money and its Real or material support. If we apply Jameson's economic diagnosis to Topdog/Underdog, we see how late capitalism also affects constructions of "masculinity"; if masculinity is based on economic worth and economics become unhinged from their Real value, then that notion of masculinity itself becomes increasingly difficult [End Page 77] to maintain. By locating the drama in a one-bedroom apartment and focusing on only two characters — brothers Lincoln and Booth — Parks forces us to confront the vast issues of racial and economic inequalities in America through their impact on the psyches of two characters. In this way, Parks transforms the "larger" notions of postmodernity, late-capitalism, and racism into psychoanalytic and diagnostic tools for studying both her characters and society at large. Topdog/Underdog is both a social drama confronting the issues of racism and classism in modern America, and a psychodrama in its focus on the individual unravelling of Lincoln and Booth as well as of their relationship. And, in fact, it could be no other way. Parks suggests that, for the black man in a racist and classist society, the psychological and the social are inextricably linked. His assessment of his worth depends on his ability to identify both with the symptom of his oppression and with the symbol of recognition: money. In classical psychoanalytic theory, the "symptom," or kernel of the neurosis, is formed by a gap in language, a space where the patient is unable to fit his or her experience into the greater social structure; as Žižek explains in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Freudian analysis claimed that the symptom could be "dissolved" by "re-establish[ing] the broken network of communication by allowing the patient to verbalize the meaning of his symptom" (73). However, identification is not resolution, and Lacan usefully reconceived the notion of symptom as "sinthome," that which the patient latches onto because "the only alternative to the symptom is nothing: pure autism, a psychic suicide, surrender to the death drive, even to the total destruction of the symbolic universe" (Žižek, Sublime Object 75). In other words, if Freud saw the end of psychoanalysis as the identification of the symptom, for Lacan, it is "identification with the symptom" (Žižek, Sublime Object 73; emphasis in original). The symptom represents the tension between the Symbolic and the Real, the tension between the fully formed appearance of self and the chaotic unconscious: the patient's confrontation with his own formation...

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