A man walks into an empty bar in a hotel that has been closed for the winter, and there is a bartender behind it who knows his name and his drink. Whether Lloyd is a ghost, a hallucination or the building itself is a question for a different kind of essay. What matters here is the transcript. Across their conversations Lloyd never once suggests that Jack Torrance should hurt anybody. He offers something far more efficient: a series of formulations in which the things Jack is already thinking become reasonable, ordinary and somebody else's fault.
// The theoryNobody has to reject a value to break it
Criminology in the 1950s assumed that offenders held deviant values learned in a deviant subculture. Sykes and Matza pointed at the awkward evidence: offenders feel guilt, admire law-abiding people, distinguish sharply between targets they consider legitimate and those they do not, and generally subscribe to the same moral order as everybody else. Their conclusion was that the moral order does not have to be rejected — it has to be neutralized, temporarily and locally, by an extension of the excuses the law itself recognizes. They catalogued five. Denial of responsibility: I was pushed, it was the drink, it was my upbringing. Denial of injury: nobody really got hurt, they are insured, it was borrowed. Denial of the victim: they had it coming, they started it, they are not the kind of person who counts. Condemnation of the condemners: everyone does it, the people judging me are worse. Appeal to higher loyalties: I did it for my family, for my people, for something that matters more than the rule.
Before, not after — which is why it matters
The detail that makes this theory useful rather than merely descriptive is chronology. An excuse offered after an act is a defense; it changes a sentence and nothing else. Sykes and Matza argued that these formulations are typically present in advance, and that they function as a release from the controls that would otherwise have prevented the act. That is why the theory sits in the control family rather than among the theories of motive: it does not explain why somebody wants to do something, it explains why the brake did not hold. And it supplies a practical test that separates the two. If the justification appears only under interrogation, it is an alibi. If the person was saying it to themselves for weeks beforehand, it is neutralization — and it did work.
// The subjectFour of the five, in order, in a hotel bar
Map the conversations and the catalogue is almost complete. Denial of responsibility arrives first and Lloyd supplies it without being asked: the discussion of the arm, the accident, the thing that happened when Jack had been drinking, framed throughout as an event rather than an action. Denial of the victim follows, and it is the heaviest piece of work — the reframing of a wife and a child from people who need protection into obstacles with intentions of their own. Condemnation of the condemners is the register the later conversations live in: the wife as the one who does not understand the work, the world as the thing that never gave a writer his due. And appeal to higher loyalties arrives with the hotel's own vocabulary, in which what is being asked for is duty, tradition and belonging — the language of a man being invited to take his place among people of a certain standing.
What Lloyd never does is give an instruction, and that absence is the whole craft. A command can be refused, and refusing it would return Jack to the position of a man deciding. Every sentence Lloyd offers is instead a description that makes a decision already taken sound like a fact about the world. The archive has a colder name for what is happening in that bar: a man supplying himself with permissions, using a voice that does not exist to say them out loud.
Lloyd
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// The crackDoes the excuse come first, or is that just where we find it?
The theory's central empirical claim is also its weakest point, and honest criminologists have said so since the 1960s. Establishing that a justification was present before the act is extremely hard: researchers almost always meet offenders afterwards, when every account is retrospective, which makes the sequence very difficult to demonstrate and leaves the theory exposed to the accusation that it has mistaken a post-hoc alibi for a pre-hoc release. Matza himself narrowed the claim in Delinquency and Drift, describing not a switch but a loosening — a state in which a person floats between convention and deviance rather than crossing a line. And there is a second limit specific to this case: neutralization explains the removal of a brake, not the existence of a drive. It has nothing at all to say about why Jack Torrance wants what he wants, and a file that used it to explain the whole man would be claiming far more than the theory can carry.
The hands are Jack’s
There is an irony in applying this particular theory that should be said out loud. Neutralisation is the study of how people excuse themselves, and an archive that analyses villains is perfectly capable of performing the same operation on their behalf — “the hotel did it” is denial of responsibility with a film-studies vocabulary. So: whatever Lloyd is, the hands are Jack's. The value of the lens is that it identifies the exact mechanism by which an ordinary man talks himself past the one thing that was stopping him, and that mechanism is not supernatural. It is available in every bar, and it usually does not need a bartender.
Three key ideas
- Sykes and Matza (1957): offenders mostly share conventional values and suspend them situationally through five techniques — denying responsibility, denying injury, denying the victim, condemning the condemners, and appealing to higher loyalties.
- The claim that matters is chronological: these are releases from control spoken before the act, not alibis spoken after. That is what places the theory in the control family and what makes it testable, and it is also its weakest empirical point.
- Lloyd never issues an order. He supplies descriptions that make a decision already taken sound like a fact about the world — and neutralization explains only the brake, never the drive.
Sources · to keep reading
- Sykes, G. M. y Matza, D. (1957). “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency”, American Sociological Review, 22(6).
- Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and Drift. John Wiley & Sons.
- Bandura, A. (1999). “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities”, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3).
- Maruna, S. y Copes, H. (2005). “What have we learned from five decades of neutralization research?”, Crime and Justice, 32.
- Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of Delinquency. University of California Press.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Lloyd?
Lloyd (“el camarero del Overlook”) is a villain from The Shining, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. Jack says he has no money.
Why does Lloyd become a villain?
Lloyd, the bartender of the Overlook, and Sykes and Matza's techniques of neutralization: the voice that pushes nobody into anything, and simply removes the one sentence that was holding them back. The file on the alibi that is spoken before the act.
Which criminological theory explains Lloyd?
Lloyd's case is analysed through Neutralization. In 1957 Gresham Sykes and David Matza noticed something the criminology of their day did not expect: most offenders share conventional values. They do not reject them — they suspend them, situation by situation, using a small repertoire of justifications spoken before the act rather than after. Deny responsibility, deny the injury, deny the victim, condemn the condemners, appeal to higher loyalties. Lloyd is that repertoire made into a character: a courteous bartender who proposes nothing, never mentions violence, and simply offers a man, one at a time, every sentence he needs to stop arguing with himself.
