Blade Runner has proved to be one of the most enduring and influential films of the 1980s. In his innovative reading, Scott Bukatman details the making of the film and its steadily improving fortunes after its initial release. He situates the film in terms of the debates about post modernism that have informed the large body of criticism devoted to it. Although Blade Runner explores the tensions fundamental to a postmodern era of bewildering technological change, Bukatman argues, it derives from the quintessentially twentieth-century, modernist experience of the city--the experience of a space both imprisoning and liberating.