Lord Farquaad: who decides who is a 'monster'

The arrival of the four Shrek films on Netflix brings back a villain we tend to remember for his height and his oversized castle, and not for what he really does. Because Lord Farquaad, the lord of DuLoc, is no ordinary tyrant: his first act of government is to sign a deportation order. He rounds up the three little pigs, Pinocchio, the blind mouse, the wolf and the rest of the fairy-tale creatures —beings who have committed no crime at all— and expels them from his kingdom to build a 'perfect' place. He is not hunting criminals: he invents them. And there, in that smiling administrative gesture, lies one of the most uncomfortable questions of critical criminology: who decides who is a monster? As always in this house, the rule is to explain is not to excuse: understanding the mechanics of power does not absolve it, it lays it bare.

// Crime is not a natural factCrime is not discovered, it is constructed

Common sense tells us that crime is something objective: there are bad acts and a law that punishes them. Critical criminology flips that board over. For authors such as Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young, who in The New Criminology (1973) broke with the tradition that sought the cause of crime inside the offender, crime is not a fact of nature sitting there waiting to be detected. It is a social construction: a label that certain behaviors receive —and others, often more harmful, do not— depending on who holds the power to hand it out. The question stops being 'why does this individual commit crimes?' and becomes 'why is this behavior, and not another, defined as a crime, and who benefits from that definition?'.

Before them, the sociologist Howard Becker had formulated it in Outsiders (1963) with brutal clarity: deviance is not a quality of the act a person commits, but a consequence of others applying rules and sanctions to them. The deviant, Becker writes, is simply someone to whom that label has been successfully attached. Transferred to DuLoc: the fairy-tale creatures do nothing; their only 'crime' is to exist in a way that gets in Farquaad's way. He supplies the crime, not they.

// He does not hunt criminals, he manufactures themFarquaad does not fight evil: he administers difference

Look at the choreography of power in DuLoc. Farquaad does not accuse the creatures of a specific act —a theft, an assault—, because there is none. He treats them as a category: 'fairy-tale vermin' who must be relocated to a swamp out of sight. It is exactly the mechanism that critical criminology denounces as the criminalization of difference: turning into an object of punishment not an action, but an identity. Power does not react to a harm; it produces the harm by redefining a group as surplus. And it does so with the aesthetics of cleanliness and order: DuLoc is white, gridded, with its jingle and its rules, a kingdom that mistakes tidiness for virtue.

The sociologist William Chambliss showed with data how that unequal distribution of the label works. In his classic study The Saints and the Roughnecks (1973) he observed two groups of young men who committed similar pranks and minor offenses; yet only one —the working-class group— was pursued, booked and treated as delinquent, while the other —from well-off families— passed as 'good kids with a future'. The behavior was almost the same; what changed was social position and, with it, the gaze of power. DuLoc is that logic taken to the fairy tale: deviance lies not in what you do, but in the place you occupy when someone with authority decides to look at you.

// The law as a tool of powerWho decides who is a monster?

The central joke of Shrek —that the ugly, grumpy ogre turns out to be the good guy, and the tidy lord of the castle the bad one— is, without meaning to, a thesis of critical criminology. The film hands us the prejudice ready-made and then dismantles it: we took for granted that the monster was Shrek because of his looks, when the real danger lay in whoever held the power to declare who is a monster. That is the decisive shift. The villain is not the one who is frightening; it is the one with the authority to decide who must be feared and expelled. The law, in Farquaad's hands, does not protect the community: it is the tool with which a power decides on whom its force falls.

It is worth being sober in bringing this down to reality, without trivializing. Critical criminology does not say that harm does not exist or that it should not be answered; it says we must watch how the category of 'criminal' is constructed, because historically it has fallen hardest on the groups with the least power to defend themselves from the label: migrants treated as a threat for the mere act of arriving, minorities policed for what they are rather than for what they do, impoverished communities on whom the penal system bears down unequally. Recognizing that pattern is not denying real crimes; it is demanding that the word 'crime' not become an elegant way of saying 'the one I have no use for'. DuLoc is a fairy tale; the mechanism is not.

That is why the Lord Farquaad case file is so revealing: his crime does not fit into any article of the classic penal code, because his crime is precisely having appropriated the code. He does not break the law: he writes it to his own measure. And that is the hardest villain to see, because he arrives signed, stamped and with the appearance of public order.