Lord Farquaad: The lord who decided who was a monster

Lord Farquaad, the tiny, meticulous lord of DuLoc in Shrek, leads no gang and wields no weapon. His crime is cleaner and colder: he signs an order. At the start of the film, his soldiers round up the fairytale creatures —the three little pigs, the talking mouse, the wolf, the fairies— and drive them out of his kingdom as if they were vermin. Farquaad wants a perfect land, and in his definition of perfection those beings are surplus. For critical criminology, this opening is a lesson disguised as comedy: Farquaad persecutes no one for what they have done, but for what they are. He does not fight crime; he manufactures it. He turns difference into an offence and belonging to a group into grounds for banishment. Power, here, does not apply the law: it writes the law to fit its own kingdom.

// The theoryWho decides what counts as a crime

Critical criminology flips the board of the whole discipline. Where the other theories ask why the individual offends, this one asks something else: who decides what counts as a crime, who writes the law, who enforces it, and why the powerful almost never end up behind bars. Its object of study is not so much crime as criminalization. The conflict theory of George Vold (1958) held that the law is the outcome of a struggle between groups: whoever wins criminalizes whoever loses. In 1973, Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young called in The New Criminology for a radical criminology, and Richard Quinney summed up the thesis: crime is defined by whoever has the power to shape policy. The law would not be a neutral mirror of harm, but a weapon that reflects power.

Farquaad illustrates the mechanism step by step. There is a group with power —he and his army— and a group with no voice —the creatures—. The first casts its interests into a decree; the decree defines "the undesirable"; the soldiers enforce it selectively against the weak; and the result is a purge with the air of an administrative formality. At no point is it proven that a talking mouse has harmed anyone. It does not need to be: in DuLoc, existing while being different is already the offence. That is the heart of the critical current —from the criminal to criminalization—, and Farquaad carries it out with the impeccable smile of someone who thinks he is tidying his house.

// The subjectThe villain is not the monster: it's whoever names it

The irony on which the entire film rests is criminologically perfect. The protagonist, Shrek, is an ogre: green, enormous, with every trait culture associates with the monster. Farquaad is small, tidy, elegant, perched atop an oversized castle. The traditional tale would have us fear the ogre and trust the lord. Shrek inverts the equation: the ogre turns out to be the victim of an eviction —the expelled creatures end up in his swamp because they have nowhere else to go— and the respectable-looking lord is the one who signs the order. Farquaad demonstrates the critical thesis in its purest form: the monster is not a fact, it is a label, and the label is handed out by whoever is in charge. Being a "monster" in DuLoc does not depend on what you do, but on whether Farquaad has put you on the list.

And like all power that criminalizes to consolidate itself, Farquaad has a motive that is not security, but legitimacy. Expelling the creatures cleanses the landscape of DuLoc and, along the way, gives his kingdom that appearance of perfect order it needs in order to crown himself. Even his search for a princess —the engine of the plot— is a calculation of power: he does not love, he covets the title of king that a marriage grants him. The criminalization of the weak and the thirst for a crown are the same operation on different scales; clearing the kingdom of undesirables and buying a throne through another person are two gestures of the same man, who treats beings —creatures or princesses— as pieces of his rise. Farquaad is no bloodthirsty tyrant of grand speeches: he is something more everyday and more unsettling, a manager of power who signs exclusions with the coolness of someone tidying his desk.

// The crackExplaining criminalization does not erase the real harm

Critical criminology is devastating for laying a Farquaad bare, but it has a well-known crack, and it is best not to dodge it. Its risk is relativism: if every crime is "a construction of power", what do we do with the real harm done to victims? The theft that ruins a poor family, the violence that shatters a life, abuse: those harms exist even though no powerful person invented them, and much of crime punishes above all the weak, not the powerful. Taken to the extreme, the current can slide into romanticizing the offender or denying real victims. Jock Young himself —one of the authors of The New Criminology— corrected course with left realism: taking the victimization of working-class neighbourhoods seriously without excusing the harm. Not everything called a crime is an unjust label; sometimes it is, quite simply, a harm that deserves a response.

That is why Farquaad is such a comfortable case for the theory: there are no victims of the creatures. No one has been harmed by a talking mouse; the criminalization here is pure and without alibi, and the critique lands squarely. But the honest criminologist cannot stop at the comfortable cases alone. Recognizing that Farquaad manufactures offenders does not force us to believe that every offender is an innocent who has been labelled. The mature reading holds both things at once: the law can be a weapon of power and, at the same time, the harm to victims can be real. Telling one case from the other —when the law pursues a harm and when it pursues a difference— is precisely the work critical criminology demands of us, not the work it spares us. Here, as always in KRIMINIS, to explain is not to excuse: understanding that Farquaad manufactured his "monsters" does not take a single gram off his responsibility for having done it.