The Godzilla Threshold

 

 

A wonderful website that I found a decade or so ago, is tvtropes.org. This site lists all the cliches and established rules and patterns of all types of media and has some informative and amusing entries. Like Wikipedia, anyone can edit and last night I was looking over the Recap entry for The Mandalorian* when I saw a couple of headings that made me giggle. One was “Damn You Muscle Memory” where a character will react out of instinct in a situation that proves to their detriment and “The Godzilla Threshold”. The latter was intriguing because it concerns using an option so utterly extreme and badass and horrid and that will result in sooo much collateral damage that you would only dream of thinking of using it in the most dire of circumstances.

To illustrate…

In the wonderful Aliens, the surviving senior marine on a rescue mission, after the majority were wiped out by xenomorphs, decides to “take off and nuke the entire site from orbit, only way to be sure”. In the generally shite Jurassic World, the heroine** decides that that only way to fight the Supercalifrajilistic Rex is to unleash the original big bad from the original movie…the frowny-faced T-Rex. And in the second Riddick movie a character states that “evil must be fought by another type of evil”.

The Godzilla Threshold is where you decide that enough is enough and there is no further to go through less draconian or even diplomatic routes. The USA felt that the bombs dropped on Japan in World War II were justified (as did the bomber on Enola Gay) because it meant killing multitudes in order to save many more.

Godzilla itself was the ultimate badass*** and despite usually being a “goody” was known to wreak havoc on the surrounding population and wreck skyscrapers like it was going out of style. Anyone invoking this ultimate deterrent was either reckless or realised there was no alternative.

British Prime Minister Margaret “dead, ha, ha” Thatcher crossed the Godzilla threshold in 1980 by authorising the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London by special forces unit the SAS. These guys do not take prisoners unless ordered to and were found later on to have intended to execute a subdued and detained terrorist, until a genuine hostage intervened.

The Godzilla Threshold is there within most institutions and organisations at least theoretically, to allow for draconian measures to be taken. This could be from something like the laying off of a majority of staff (many businesses globally due to Covid-19) to the mythical “kill switch” that was rumoured to exist within British telephone exchanges in the 1980s (stopping all non-essential phone communication in the event of a national catastrophe or emergency).

Rarely utilised and more rarely even known about, these measures are the stuff of folklore and campfire tales that only have some credence. If you have a Godzilla option, you aren’t exactly going to be generous with sharing knowledge of it, be it financial, societal or even lethal.

Something that I’ve found recently is that the lockdown due to Covid has pushed people’s patience beyond what would normally be considered the outer limits. I posted last week on a Facebook group for expats in Rome, asking for advice on what items may be carried for self defence in Italy (pepper spray is legal here). The thread generated over 300 comments before the admins switched off the ability to comment. Some amusing, some helpful but a lot hateful or even racist, accusing me of suffering from PTSD, of wanting to carry a gun and that I should smile more. The irritability of people has become more and more mainstream now and things that can be used to initiate a fight sometimes will be.

Everyone has a Godzilla threshold. We just don’t use them very often or ever. One way to stop your neighbour from parking across your driveway would be to smash the bitch’s car windows and/ or let her tyres down. A method to stop your teenage daughter’s ex-boyfriend from pestering her would be to batter the shit out of the little bastard. A measure to punish a queue jumper in the supermarket would be to smash them over the head with bottle of prosecco. We don’t take these measures because our moral codes tell us not to but more so because we fear societal sanction for reacting to our base instincts. From playschool to your first job, life dictates that you must follow certain rules and that punishment will follow if you do not.

In Italy we are locked down over Xmas and New Year. No travelling outside your own municipality and a 10pm curfew. Italians don’t like this but the police are making sure rules are followed each day. On Wednesday I cycled to Vatican City and saw at least seven people getting stopped by cops and asked to show ID or told to put their masks on/ pull them up over their noses. In the UK however the Christmas rules are so fucking complicated that you need an Honours degree in cuntyness and an abacus just to try and fathom them out. For a five-day period, households may create a “bubble of 3”. I can’t be arsed to explain any more than that, so google it if you want to know more but this is, in my opinion, merely a way for the government to avoid a rise in Covid infections and potential rioting or even civil war as people have now been given SOME freedom over the Yuletide period rather than none and will not invoke their Godzilla options of simply throwing caution to the wind and doing whatever the fuck they like.

The fabric of society is thinly stretched. Having worked as both a cop and a postman in the UK I have seen just how rules and regulations and so called “normality” are balanced against a potential avalanche of chaos.

The governments of the world have always had Godzilla options. In the UK, 90% of police are routinely UNARMED but any Chief Constable (Commissioner in London) has the authority to arm their officers and they don’t only because of the fear of negative public opinion. Governments declaring martial law is the Godzilla option that is rarely and sparingly used but as time goes on we are seeing more and more disillusioned people who are getting fed up with being told to wear masks and simply sit back as their lives become static and their money dwindles away.

Sooner or later, people will move from fantasising about what they would do in the most extreme of circumstances and begin contemplating really doing it. And that is where things are scary.

If you even consider using Godzilla then you are past a point of tolerance that you shouldn’t be at.

Hopefully things will calm down soon but it could go either way. Time will tell.

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* Which give me such hope that Disney haven't completely fucked Star Wars up the bum.
** While running in high heels, no less!
*** Although the less said about its fucking nephew Godzooky the better.