I didn’t have a chance to write a good post today, so here’s some recycled content from last year:
Nobody believes me when I tell them that I think Fiddler on the Roof is the best science fiction musical tragicomedy ever.
Fiddler on the Roof, at its core, is about a slightly old-fashioned man experiencing future shock. In a time of great cultural change, Tevye’s ways, the old ways, are repeatedly assaulted. First, his daughter Tzeitel refuses her arranged marriage and begs to be allowed to marry the poor tailor that she loves. And Tevye relents! He overcomes his culture shock, his fear of the new, and realizes that things won’t be so bad this way. Then, his second daughter rebels, asking for only his blessing for her wedding, not his permission, and again, he relents! One again, he overcomes the cultural bonds of tradition, moving forward with the times. As a modern viewer, I felt such pride for the human race, that he could see through the old things and allow passion to bloom.
Then, the tragic turn. Tevye’s third daughter has fallen in love with a non-Jewish Russian, and asks to marry him, but Tevye cannot allow this. He has found the line that he cannot cross. He becomes a victim of future shock and it destroys him. He cannot speak with this daughter again, and you can see that the man is absolutely devastated by his decision, and yet still he remains firm. This moment… “on the other hand… on the other hand…” there is no other hand! It was one of the most moving scenes of any musical for me. Rationality loses in the end, but I think the moral, from this perspective, is just that, perhaps we cannot force change too quickly without breaking the things that we wish to preserve through societal upheaval.
It’s not that long ago that marrying for love seemed like an outlandish concept, even a speculative one. Fiddler on the Roof may not have been written as a SF story, but it does what a great science fiction story does; it deals with the intersection of people and ideas; in this case, the traditional man of Tevye, and the idea that tradition not need hold in opposition of love. It needs no robots or rocket ships. The future does not always come in the form of technological advancements.
