Terminator 2 thus not only reconstructs the fallen public world and queasy temporality of classic film noir but also constructs them together in the form of an apocalypse that has, in effect, already occurred. Like Walter Benjamin's once-scandalous Angel of History, the film's chronotope offers us a perspective from which modernity appears less a 'chain of events' than 'one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon, wreckage, and hurls it in front of [our] feet', a 'storm' that is 'what we call progress Yet the very incongruity of such a rhyme between the ruminations of a Marxistmodernist intellectual in Europe at the end of the 1930s and a contemporary Hollywood blockbuster film raises its own set of questions concerning what 'conditions of possibility' must have been met before such a view could become mainstream. What preconditions must be met before a mass audience can find such an anti-progressive perspective pleasurable, can 'want to believe this', as Leo Braudy says of the rise and fall of generic perspectives in general; and what consequences follow from Terminator 2's particular channellings of that desire?

Fredric Jameson suggests that the predominance of dystopic visions in contemporary science fiction signals the general loss of our ability even to conceive of, much less struggle to enact, a utopian social vision, trapped as we are within both an imperialist nation in decline and the overheated 'perpetual present' of postmodernist culture. 16 And much of Terminator 2 , with its timed bursts of violence merged with state-of-the-art special effects, offers itself up to such an interpretive hypothesis as Exhibit A. (Call to reception theorists: how many in the American audience recognized in the evil cybernetic techno-war depicted in Terminator 2's opening post-apocalyptic sequence an image of a hysterically celebrated Gulf War just past, in which 'our' machines mowed down their human bodies, as the saying goes, 'like fish in a tank'? And what were the effects of this surely unintentional echo?) Yet here again, like a good blockbuster, Terminator 2 also invites us to critique the violence it presents, and quite explicitly, in Sarah's diatribe to scientist Dyson. 'Men like you built the hydrogen bomb,' she roars. 'Men like you thought it up . . . . You don't know what it's like to create something.' It is a speech that might have been drawn from, or at least inspired by, the works of such essentialist critics of male instrumental rationality as Susan Griffin, or such proponents of a maternalist-based women's peace movement as Sarah Ruddick or Helen Caldecott; and it is there for the taking, not instead of but right along with the violence it decries.