There seem to be multiple concepts of utopia clogging our discussion at the moment. I had intended my original post as offering a more historically grounded version of what the concept has meant in terms of science fiction since Roberta's original post contained only science fiction examples. Utopianism has been a central concept in science fiction, with the early pulp magazines of Hugo Gernsbeck helping to set the tone for much of the subsequent development of the genre by popularizing the technological utopian rhetoric of late 19th and early 20th century middle class reformers who felt that modeling society more after a machine would lead to a more perfect order. Howard Segel has written a book on the technological utopian tradition which is well worth reading. There had been, of course, earlier versions of fictional utopias in philosophy, such as Thomas Moore's original UTOPIA, in writings about the New World as a utopian space, etc. Peter Fitting argues that the social utopian tradition emerges in the 1960s, typically around the work of feminist science fiction writers and focusing on changing the social order to allow for greater equality and diversity. I argue in my forthcoming book on STAR TREK that it draws on both of those traditions, while melding them with a healthy dose of space opera. In this context, then, I see utopianism as a specific ideological discourse and a specific generic tradition. On the other hand, there is a very different tradition of talking about utopianism within film and media studies which I also find very helpful and which can probably cover most of the other examples, from THE WIZARD OF OZ to PHILADELPHIA STORY, which people have suggested. Richard Dyer has argued that popular entertainment provides us not with an image of what utopia looks like, the specific concern of the genre tradition described above, but "what utopia feels like." Dyer's model includes both narrative elements (such as shifts within the character relations), thematic concerns (such as community), but also formal aspects (such as music, which can give us a sense of intensity, or color, which creates a lushness, etc.) Frederic Jameson pushes this further to say that entertainment, in order to be effective, must offer a certain degree of utopianism (a sense of a better world that responds to the felt needs, frustrations, and unsatisfied desires we feel in our present world.) Further still, Dyer's work in queer theory points to a utopian mode of reception within the gay and lesbian community, a desire for texts which speak of pleasures which the mainstream media rarely acknowledges, a desire to imagine alternatives to the pain of living in a homophobic society. Dyer identifies a number of different forms of entertainment, popular with gay and lesbian audiences, such as Disco,Opera or Judy Garland's musicals, which provide this utopian pleasure. Finally, we might identify the notion of a utopian space as the "green world" beyond the edges of civilization, a space characters can move into not so much to construct a new social order but rather to escape society's constraints altogether. This image of a utopian escape into a "green world" is most visible within the romantic comedyy tradition where characters gain psychological fluidity by escaping from their normal social sphere, enabling romance to resolve the irreconcilable differences between the characters and facilitating their marriage. See the bus trip in IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT or the trip to Conn. in BRINGING UP BABY as archtypial examples. Could the lush, green landscape at the end of BLADERUNNER be understood in that tradition, as the space which allows the two protagonists to escape their fixed social roles into a more fluid world where the line between human and android, man and woman, may be less rigidly enforced and where they may then achieve a personal utopia through marriage? One reason why this discussion, while productive, gets confusing is that different posts seem to use utopia in different ways, depending on which tradition we are evoking, and so, there seem to be few films which fit comfortably within the utopian genre (as Roberta first suggested and seems true) but that some form of utopianism is recognizable in almost all Hollywood genre films (which would seem to be axiomatic for Dyer or Jameson). The same is at the roots, I think, within debates between whether a utopian film must have larger social categories at its roots or may be focused around individual characters, whether utopian films must construct an alternative social order or it is sufficient to show the characters escaping from a dystopian social order into the "green world" beyond. I hope this clarifies rather than shuts down what is proving to be one of the more substantive discussions on Screen-L in a long while. Henry Jenkins