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Power In On The Waterfront

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Power In On The Waterfront
In The Politics of Power in “On the Waterfront, “ author Peter Biskind employs sophisticated diction and a journalistic tone to analogize this film to the life of Elia Kazan during the Red Scare of the 1950s. His interpretation of the film is complex, but it mainly consists of the notion that Terry Malloy suffers from an “interior struggle, his struggle to come to moral awareness and to act on his new perception of right and wrong” (29) (much like Kazan went through during the HUAC hearings) and that the film itself “offers an elitist model of society in which power is the prerogative of experts in the law and its enforcement in alliance with social engineers, and family to perform an essential task of social control” (30). He further interprets
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