Disadvantageous: Gentrification and The Cyberpunk …...（ 169 ）（ 168 ） Disadvantageous: Gentrification and The Cyberpunk Aesthetic 103 and unemployment is at 45 percent (Thompson

99

Abstract

The science fiction film Blade Runner (Deeley, de Lauzurika & Scott, 1982), and the cyber-punk aesthetic that followed in its wake, have influenced not only filmmakers, but surpris-ingly developers involved in urban revitalization projects in cities throughout the world. From plans to put digital billboards atop Los Angeles high-rises to Blade Runner themed food courts which promise the chaos of Tokyo backstreets, these plans have often been part and parcel of the process of gentrification, with both developers and new tenants lured by the vibrancy of multicultural urban meccas, yet whose impact on these neighbor-hoods has often been homogenization and the displacement of the original inhabitants. As Klein (1991) notes, the admiration and romanticization of the film’s cityscape also carries an ambivalence toward the working and urban poor, many of whom are ethnic minorities. Morley and Robins (1995) argue further that the techno-orientalist aesthetic of Blade Run-ner hides a resentment of the Other, expressing a fear of a Japanese, or East-Asian, eco-nomic ascendancy. How then should the cyberpunk narrative, whose themes of identity and displacement account for this ambivalence and its effects on urban communities? This paper takes up Jennifer Phang’s 2015 film Advantageous as an answer to how the science fiction cityscape might critique both techno-orientalism and its coopting in the process of gentrification.

Keywords: cyberpunk, gentrification, urban development, displacement, Jennifer Phang, Advantageous, techno-orientalism, Blade Runner, food

Disadvantageous: Gentrification and The Cyberpunk Aesthetic

In the spring of 2008, a series of articles appeared about a Los Angeles real estate mogul

whose revitalization project for the city held a decidedly dystopian influence. Holding up the

now iconic image of a geisha superimposed over plans for his downtown high-rises, Sonny As-

tani unveiled his ambition to turn the Tokyo-inspired setting of Blade Runner (Deeley, de

Lauzurika & Scott, 1982) into a partial reality (Cathcart, 2008). Astani’s plans attracted both

bemusement and horror from the media, with one columnist accusing the exile from Tehran

【Research Note】

Disadvantageous: Gentrification andThe Cyberpunk Aesthetic

ELLIS, Sara K

（ 170 ）（ 171 ）『明治大学国際日本学研究』第 9 巻第 1 号100

of seeing the film’s “Hobbesian vision of a future L.A.” as a pleasant contrast to the Khomeini

regime (Beiser, 2008; Rutten, 2008). The uproar, however, had less to do with aesthetics—giant

video screens in cities were certainly nothing new in 2008—than the looming 2019 date in the

film. Blade Runner’s ‘incept date’ was now a mere decade away, and while an ongoing drought

may have dispelled fears of the rainy future depicted in the film, the burst of the U.S. housing

bubble and subsequent recession were certainly powerful reminders of its poverty (California

Department of Water Resources, 2010).

Astani’s plans, in fact, were neither new nor novel. As Norman Klein recorded nearly 20

years prior, the film had already become “a paradigm for the future of cities” (1991, p. 147). At

a Los Angeles public arts lecture he attended in 1990, Klein watched an audience react with

similar dismay when three out of the five urban planners presenting “agreed that they hoped

someday L.A. would look like the [film]” (1991). Nor have such aspirations faded or remained

exclusive to the film’s setting. The celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain has more recently an-

nounced plans to create a Blade Runner themed food market “inspired by the set décor. . . and

the vibrant back alleys of Tokyo” in Manhattan’s quickly developing far West Side (Dunn,

2015; Geiger, 2015).

Techno-Orientalism and the Postmodern Appeal of Poverty

Developers cite both temporal and cultural contrasts for the film’s appeal. Astani, in an in-

terview in the New York Times, was “gripped by the notion of looming skyscrapers covered

with moving images and graphics, and the layering of old and new structures” (as cited in

Cathcart, 2008), while Bourdain is lured by the chaotic, sensory impact reminiscent of the back

alleys of Tokyo and Singapore (Kaye, 2015). Yet, as Klein notes, there is a disquieting lack of

self-awareness to this admiration and the impact of redevelopment on those already residing

in the areas for which it has been slated:

Two of the designers gave specific examples. They loved Santee alley, a bustling outdoor

market in the downtown garment center, also not far from the homeless district. Of

course, the general area is slated for urban renewal anyway, so this was a safe comment.

It is easy to root for the horse once it is off to the glue factory. (1991, p.147)

A “transitional film” combining the “forties memorabilia of Lucas and Spielberg (Klein,

1991, p. 147)” and the cyberpunk aesthetic that would follow with the novels of William Gibson

and films like The Matrix (Silver & Wachowski, 1999) and Ghost in the Shell (Mizuo ＆ Oshii,

1995), Blade Runner as Kevin McNamara writes, was itself a critique of ongoing urban devel-

（ 170 ）（ 171 ） Disadvantageous: Gentrification and The Cyberpunk Aesthetic 101

opment, both the abandonment of progressive urbanism, resulting in a workforce comprised of

minorities and urban poor, and a crop up of new high-rises spurred on by the repeal of height

limitations (1997, p. 427).

Writing on Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell, Wong Kin Yuen characterizes this aes-

thetic as “decadence, anarchy, and fantasy on the one hand, and a mistrusted, hyper high tech

reality” (2000, p.1). These settings emphasize the central motifs of the cyberpunk genre, which

concern themselves with the fallibility and imposition of both history and memory. Jane Chi

Hyun Park narrows these down to questions about “what makes us ‘human’ in a heavily cor-

poratized, media-saturated world. How do we differ from higher forms of artificial intelligence.

. . distinguish objects, places, and experiences from their mediated copies?” (2005, p. 61).

The cyberpunk aesthetic has also been loudly critiqued as revealing Western ambivalence

towards a technologically ascendant Japan during the 1980s. In cyberpunk representations of

Japan and the East, argue Morley and Robins, “Japan has come to exist as the figure of empty

and dehumanized technological power. It represents the alienated and dystopian image of cap-

italist progress” (1995, p. 170). Remarking on the popularity of ‘Japanimation’ and Ghost in the

Shell, Ueno Toshiya has also argued that it is indicative of a “complex about Japan, in which

Japan is the object of transference of the envy and contempt from other cultures and nations. . .

the Orient exists in so far as the West needs it, because it brings the project of the West into

focus” (“Japanimation and Techno-Orientalism,” n.d.).

A similar ambivalence is arguably present in developers, who laud “the rude aesthetics of

an immigrant market, but imagine it safely barricaded between buildings hundreds of feet

high” (Klein, 1991, p. 147). This contradiction ripples out in the appeal of such neighborhoods

for the waves of gentrifiers lured to urban areas by ‘ethnic packaging’ for an “outside commu-

nity looking for something unlike the suburbs” (Hackworth & Reckers, 2005, p. 232), but where

neighborhoods are conversely “defined as ‘good,’” writes Sarah Schulman, “because they were

moving toward homogeneity. Or ‘safe’ because they became dangerous to the original inhabi-

tants” (2012, p. 29).

Cyberpunk as Nostalgia for a Pre-Gentrified Era

Certainly, the results of urban development and gentrification in many urban centers

have by now made it glaringly clear that Blade Runner was always already a nostalgia piece.

The rise of the tech industry, which ostensibly promised this future, is now known more for

the darkened windows of Google company vans—the better to hide the homeless— and pric-

ing out working and middle class residents from New York to San Francisco (Corbyn, 2014).

The aesthetic of this real future has also been arguably less chaos and hustle than flat and


nondescript, with the ethnic restaurants and mom-and-pop businesses replaced by chain stores

and logos. As Klein presciently noted, “Blade Runner helps us remember high urban decay at

the moment before a community sank like a stone; or gentrified into something else” (1991, p.

151). How then should the science fiction film reimagine the future in light of economic reality?

How can it incorporate the collusion of techno-orientalism in repackaging urban landscapes

and the displacement of long-term residents?

Advantageous

In January, 2015, Jennifer Phang’s Advantageous (Chang, 2015) premiered at the Sundance

Film Festival to critical acclaim. Expanded from a 23-minute short subject (Thompson ＆

Phang, 2012), and funded through a Kickstarter campaign, the film was faulted by some critics

for being “wan-looking” and a “universe of such quietness and sterility that it’s difficult to care

about its inhabitants” (Hassenger, 2015; Semerene, 2015). Such criticism, however, overlooked

both its limited budget and the aesthetic behind its return to a more streamlined future. Rath-

er than derivative, the film’s clean lines and minimalist design work to enhance its central nar-

rative of inequality, while its visual and narrative allusions to Blade Runner and Ghost in the

Shell, act as potent metaphors for gentrification and displacement.

Director and co-writer, Phang got her inspiration for the film while living in the rapidly

gentrifying neighborhood of Washington Heights. Shuttling back and forth between her home

and the Upper West Side, Phang observed the contrast in how the poor and the privileged in-

teracted with their environment:

. . . you get a sense as to how your financial or racial status can affect how your child in-

teracts with the rest of the world. I could see kids accepting that their position in the

world was slightly less advantaged. And then there were other kids who had already as-

sumed the position of, not dominance, but advantage. They were just pouncing on knowl-

edge and opportunity, demonstrating a type of very public, active learning. . . especially

on the Upper West Side. And kids that were less like that seemed to have parents who

were just exhausted or really worried about their children’s safety and security. (Phang,

2015)

To restate, Advantageous’s narrative and central motifs bear strong similarities to both

Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell, with regard to the rights to memory and identity, al-

though it is set in a slightly more distant future. In 2041, as opening of the short subject re-

veals, the population has reached 10.1 billion, the public school system has been dismantled


and unemployment is at 45 percent (Thompson ＆ Phang, 2012). The onus and threat of unem-

ployment, however, has not fallen on cyborgs or replicants, but a more realistic and historical-

ly constant underclass: women. Gwen Koh, played by Jacqueline Kim (who co-authored the

feature film with Phang), works as the spokesperson for the Center for Advanced Health and

Living, a sinister company that peddles alternatives to ‘invasive cosmetic surgery’. A single

mother of 12-year-old Jules (Samantha Kim), Gwen struggles to eke out a middle-class exis-

tence and ensure a future for her daughter in a world where women are undervalued. She is

soon informed by her employer, however, that she will be replaced by a younger, ‘more uni-

versal’ type, just as Jules is rejected by the magnet school, a remnant of the public school sys-

tem. To pay for Jules’ education at an expensive private alternative, Gwen volunteers to be-

come the new ‘face’ of the center, a combination of test subject and P.R. person, by allowing

her consciousness to be transferred into a younger, more racially ambiguous body. Yet Gwen

is initially unaware that her consciousness will not be her own, but a copy or ‘twin’; her own

essence will die as it is shifted into the host body (hereafter referred to as Gwen 2.0).

Privilege and the Illusion of Continuity

Gwen’s coercement into a position where she must abandon her own ethnically Korean

appearance for a younger, more homogenous look is gentrification made horrifically manifest,

a twofold allusion to both white washing in Hollywood films—notably Scarlett Johansson’s

casting as Motoko Kusanagi in the live action Ghost in the Shell (Child, 2015)—and a metaphor

for the displacement of identity and history. Her consciousness and memories, Gwen is told,

are being conserved as her shell is once again made vital. She is, in effect, a human preserva-

tion project, an embodiment of how, as Michael Herzfeld writes, gentrification often uses the

goal of historical preservation as its rationale. “Historic conservation often provides an excuse

for intervention into urban life. In a revision of high modernism’s focus on science, logic, and

efficiency, this trend invokes ‘the past.’ But which past?” (2010, p. S259). And in the case of

Gwen 2.0, whose? This question is eerily invoked in Ghost in the Shell, when a sanitation

worker, whose identity as a father and warm memories of a daughter are revealed to be im-

plants (Mizuo ＆ Oshii, 1995). The man’s positioning as a member of the working class further

emphasizes his vulnerability to such displacement and erasure, just as Gwen’s economic plight

allows her to fall victim to the Center’s manipulation. In Advantageous, Gwen 2.0 (Freya Ad-

ams) has a similar revelation when her employer, Dave Fisher, reveals that she is merely a

copy of her predecessor’s consciousness. The memory in which Gwen learns she will not sur-

vive the transfer has been erased, Fisher says, to facilitate the transition. Thus, Gwen 2.0 has

been enjoying wealth, privilege, and the illusion of having always existed in exchange for an-


other’s erasure. As Schulman writes, the process of gentrification encourages a forgetful com-

placency: “the privileged who the entire society is constructed to propel, unlearn that those

earlier communities ever existed. They replaced the history and experience of their neighbor-

hoods’ former residents with a distorted sense of themselves as timeless” (2012, p. 26).

This illusion of continuity, of having always existed in the space of Gwen 2.0’s body, has

been purchased by the first Gwen at the price of her successor’s self-knowledge as well as the

former’s own truth. “It was intentional,” Phang said of Gwen’s collusion with the system, “I feel

that a number of people. . . take advantage of other people’s needs or desperation, feel a cer-

tain amount of desperation themselves, and use that to justify what they are doing” (Phang,

2015).

As in Blade Runner, which “projects a world in which technologies of image and memory

production render human experience and memory ultimately indistinguishable from the expe-

rience of, and the memories created for, the replicants,” (McNamara, 1997, p. 423) Advanta-

geous reveals this obfuscation in starkly capitalist terms.

Landscape and Identity

Gwen’s narrative positioning as the face of the Center is also a deft allusion to both Blade

Runner’s cityscape and Rick Deckard’s constructed selfhood. The former’s massive video

screen featuring a smiling geisha overlooking the city is arguably the film’s most iconic image,

“an enormous electronic billboard displaying a Japanese woman in stereotypical garb and

makeup repeatedly swallowing a pill and smiling,” which “both links this oriental representa-

tion to American corporate power and subordinates the latter to the former” (Yu, 2008, p. 56).

It is, writes Wong Kin Yuen, “an indispensible motif among cyberpunk films. . . the hallmark of

postmodern cities” (2000, p. 7). As the spokeswoman for the Center of Advanced Health and

Living, it is Gwen rather than the pill-swallowing geisha who beckons to the people in the city

streets below, offering relief from age and physical imperfection. This positioning works as

both a powerful critique of mostly male-centered cyberpunk narratives, wherein Jane Chi

Hyun Park, argues, “the ‘Orient’ and cyberspace function as feminized constructs to be pene-

trated and contained by the Western male subject” (2005, pp. 61–62). By centering the ‘geisha’

as protagonist, Phang and Kim artfully sidestep the dominant narrative, while critiquing her

commodification and relegation to the background. Phang and Kim have also added their own

iconography in tune with the film’s theme of loss and erasure: a skyscraper shaped like a

headless woman, a fountain of water rushing down its body as if relinquishing its identity. As

with Deckard, who takes his identity cues from Los Angeles’ noir cityscape, the Gwen who ap-

pears on the billboard is clinical and nondescript, evocative of the film’s bland, minimalist aes-


thetic which mimics late stage gentrification (Chayka, 2016).

Exterior shots are mostly lit by bright sunlight, leaving the sparse collection of people on

the streets exposed to windows and floating surveillance cameras, capable of eavesdropping

on conversations. As in Blade Runner, hovercraft float over the city, shining invasive search-

lights through windows. The poor we see are not hustling, but exposed and vulnerable. In

fact, the cityscape in Advantageous makes those of Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell seem

increasingly like bohemian hovels where denizens can at least dare to make a living and even

enjoy themselves, however illicitly. The film’s opening shot, a deceptively sanguine image of

three racially diverse schoolgirls walking blithely home from school through a clean urban

street, brings to mind the comforting diverse lite messages of ad copy, yet their play soon re-

veals a divide when Jules is pitted by a wealthy girl against a mutual friend. “You need to

play more games Jules,” the wealthy girl says. “Only one of you can be the winner” (Advanta-

geous, 2015). Even when they witness a terrorist’s bomb explode in the distance, they react as

if it is mere inconvenience. For these girls, test scores and loss of social status pose a far stron-

ger threat.

Food and Gentrification

In science fiction film, writes Laurel Forster, food may “allude to dystopian lifestyles in

general; or more specifically, it may metonymically stand for cultural difference and otherness

or a shift in consciousness” (2004, p. 263). Forster takes up a scene in Blade Runner, in which

Rick Deckard haggles with the owner of a food stall that resembles a Tokyo ramen cart, and

unable to make himself understood, points to the noodle dish he wants. Forster reads the

botched communication between the two, and the eventually discarded carton of noodles as

“compounding the sense of waste and decay” (2004, p. 260). Nevertheless, as Klein can attest,

this was not the way that audiences read the scene. “Interestingly enough,” he writes, “audi-

ences in L.A. often remember this scene fondly—Harrison Ford at lunch—at a farmers’ mar-

ket outdoor eatery that might have possibilities. Indeed, there is nothing of the shopping mall

bistro here. It looks random, alive” (1991, p. 150). Anthony Bourdain’s plans for his ‘Blade Run-

ner’ market seem to bear out Klein’s remarks. While an “Asian themed beer garden” has been

touted in press release, both Bourdain and his business partner, Steven Werther, have mostly

emphasized tonier Western fare, such as “tapas and oyster bars” (Kaye, 2015).

The city in Advantageous also seems devoid of culinary diversity or vibrancy. There are

no food stalls, nor even many restaurants, and food is barely visible when Gwen, and later

Gwen 2.0, attend ostensibly opulent luncheons with the mothers of Jules’ classmates. When

Gwen attempts to take Jules to a casual Italian eatery they seem to have frequented in the


past, they find it closed: A brief shot of the owner, an older woman, sitting inside and disap-

pointedly counting a wad of bills, indicates yet another female economic casualty, while a sign

near the door, confirming the restaurant’s ‘Level 2’ status, also hints of the type of regulatory

crackdowns on local business that accompany a surge of wealthier residents. As Schulman

notes, “Permits are suddenly required for performing, for demonstrating, for dancing in bars,

for playing musical instruments, for selling food. . .” (2012, p. 28). That the film’s final scene fea-

tures the sharing of a meal near what seems to be the city’s lone street performer is also one

of the film’s few optimistic notes. This restaurant imagery is later repeated when Gwen, now

privy to the truth about the body transfer, makes one last desperate attempt to escape her

fate. Here, she asks her estranged cousin (Jennifer Ikeda) and husband (Ken Jeong) for enough

money to make do until she can find a job. The restaurant, dark and empty of customers, fur-

ther emphasizes her isolation from her family, alluding to an earlier, happier scene in which

Gwen, makes a dessert for Jules from that same cousin’s recipe.

Rare scenes in which food is eaten are some of the few threads of intimacy and kindness

in the film. In one, Gwen provides a fast food meal for a homeless woman who sleeps in a

hedge that fronts her building. In another, Gwen packs sliced fruit in Jules’ lunch, food that

will be seen once more when Jules, now apprised of Gwen 2.0’s real identity, feeds it to the ail-

ing stranger who holds her mother’s memories.

Makeshift Family and Conservative Backlash

This scene of ‘mother’ daughter reciprocation is also evocative of the makeshift families

that formed during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, which swept through the gay mec-

cas of New York and San Francisco, displacing thousands of residents and accelerating the

rise in rents. If Blade Runner’s incept dates and predestined early deaths—the makeshift fam-

ily of replicants in the house of J.F. Sebastian, his own infirmities making him an outcast—now

seem prescient of the AIDS era, Advantageous is a dystopia that could easily be extrapolated

from the same period. An oppressive atmosphere of patriarchy and compulsive heterosexuali-

ty pervades this future, recalling the backlash against second wave feminism and the rise of

the Moral Majority, which threatened to turn back progress for women and sexual minorities

in the 1980s (Miller, 2014). Jules is tutored by a ‘holoprof’ who gives lessons on the ‘neo tradi-

tionalist movement’ and teaches her that “women are going forward, going backward,” while

her employer at the Center, Dave Fisher informs her that employment recruiters are discrimi-

nating against women in order to protect them (Chang ＆ Phang, 2015).

Gwen is not only othered by being female and of a less ‘universal’ racial makeup, but faces

further marginalization for her status as a single mother. In one scene, she appears at a lun-


cheon to meet the wealthy mothers of Jules’ schoolmates, who praise her moxie in being a ca-

reer woman, yet balk that Jules’ father will not be a part of her life. When Gwen calls her es-

tranged, religious mother for help, she is prayed for and admonished for having a child out of

wedlock. One particularly pointed shot shows Gwen’s perspective as she looks on at a man

and woman embracing on the street, reflecting less her loneliness than a need for protection

in a patriarchal society where a social safety net is longer there to protect her.

A similarly oppressive sense of mourning and loss also saturates the homelessness and

displacement in the film, reflective of the emptying out of urban neighborhoods that occurred

during the epidemic. As Schulman remembers of those dying in her New York neighborhood,

“Sometimes they were too sick to live alone or to pay their rent and left their apartments to

die on friend’s couches or in hospital corridors. Many died in their apartments. It was normal

to hear that someone we knew had died and that their belongings were thrown out on the

street” (2012, p. 37). In one particularly mordant scene, Gwen and Jules hear someone weeping

through the walls of their apartment, and Jules presses her ear to the floor and then climbs up

on her bed to listen through the ceiling. “Upstairs woman or downstairs woman?” asks Gwen

casually, as if this is a dour game they play to pass the time. Jules turns to her mother and

says, “Both” (Chang ＆ Phang, 2015).

If any hope exists in the film, it thus resides in the makeshift family formed in the after-

math of loss, and the defiance of conservative social norms. Gwen 2.0, having confessed the

truth to Jules and her cousin, gathers the family together, helping them establish the bond

that Gwen has lost and that Jules has been denied her entire life. More than a family, howev-

er, Jules is being provided with a record, a history of her mother, first suppressed and then

erased in trade for economic privilege.

“Gentrified happiness,” writes Schulman, “is often available to us in return for collusion

with injustice. We go along with it, usually, because of the privilege of dominance, which is the

privilege not to notice how our way of living affects less powerful people” (2012, p. 166). Gwen

2.0’s choice in the closing moments of the film to acknowledge that the consciousness her new

body enjoys came at the expense of a less powerful individual is the hope that such erasure

can be stopped.

References

Beiser, V. (2008, April 21). L.A. Real Estate Mogul Plans to Light Up Blade Runner Style Billboards. Wired. Retrieved fromhttps://www.wired.com/2008/04/st-bladerunner/

California Department of Water Resources. (2010). California’s Drought: An Overview. Retrieved from


http://www.water.ca.gov/waterconditions/docs/DroughtReport2010.pdfCathcart, R. (2008, May 21). A Developer’s Unusual Plan for Bright Lights, Inspired by a Dark Film. The

New York Times. Retrieved fromhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/arts/design/21blad.html

Chang, R. M. (Producer), ＆ Phang, J. (Director). (2015). Advantageous. [Motion Picture]. United States : Film Presence.

Chayka, K. (2016, August 7). Same old, same old. How the hipster aesthetic is taking over the world. The Guardian. Retrieved fromhttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/06/hipster-aesthetic-taking-over-world

Child, B. (2015, April 15). Whitewashing row over Scarlett Johansson’s Ghost in the Shell role reignites. The Guardian. Retrieved fromhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/ 2016 /apr/ 15 /scarlett-johanssons-role-in-ghost-in-the-shell-ignites-twitter-storm

Corbyn, Z. (2014, February 23). Is San Francisco Losing its Soul? The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/23/is-san-francisco-losing-its-soul

Deeley, M. ＆ de Lauzirika, C. (Producers) & Scott, R. (Director). (1982). Blade Runner [Motion Picture]. United States: Warner Brothers.

Dunn, M. (2015, May 19). Anthony Bourdain will transform his International Food Market into a scene from Blade Runner. News.com.au. Retrieved fromhttp://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/design/anthony-bourdain-will-transform-his-international-food-market-into-a-scene-from-blade-runner/news-story/12f49473e5d284300ab1f66834776b2e

Forster, L. (2004). Futuristic Foodways. In A.L. Bower (Ed.), Reel Food:Essays on Food and Film. 251–266. New York, NY. Routledge.

Geiger, D. (2015, May 12). Google gobbles up New York. Crain’s New York Business. Retrieved from http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20150512/REAL_ESTATE/150519959/google-gobbles-up-new-york-search-giant-poised-to-anchor-new-development-on-pier-57

Hackworth, J., & Reckers, J. (2005). Ethnic Packaging and Gentrification: The Case of Four Toronto Neigh-borhoods. Urban Affairs Review, 41. 211–236.DOI: 10.1177/1078087405280859

Hassenger, J. (2015, June 25). Advantageous finds eerie plausibility in science fiction. The AV Club. Re-trieved fromhttp://www.avclub.com/review/advantageous-finds-eerie-plausibility-science-fict-221242

Kaye, B. (2015, May 16). Anthony Bourdain to open giant Blade Runner-themed food market in New York City. Consequence of Sound. Retrieved from consequenceofsound.net/ 2015 . 05 /anthony-bourdain-to-open-giant-blade-runner-themed-food-market-in-new-york-city/

Klein, N. (1991). Building Blade Runner. Social Text, 28. 147-152. Duke University Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/466383

McNamara, K. (1997) Blade Runner’s Post-Individual Worldspace. Contemporary Literature. Vol. 38. No. 3. pp. 442–446.University of Wisconsin Press. Retrieved from http://jstor.org/stable/120897415-08-2016

Miller, S. (2014, May 19).The evangelical presidency: Reagan’s dangerous love affair with the Christian right. Salon. Retrieved fromhttp://www.salon.com/2014/05/18/the_evangelical_presidency_reagans_dangerous_love_affair_with_the_christian_right/


Mizuo, Y. (Producer), ＆ Oshii, M. (Director). (1995). Ghost in the Shell [Motion Picture]. Japan: Bandai Visual.

Morley, D., & Robins, K. (1995). Techno-Orientalism: Japan Panic. In Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Elec-tronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries. 147–173. New York, Routledge.

Park, J. (2005) Stylistic Crossings: Cyberpunk Impulses in Anime. World Literature Today, 79, 60-63. Re-trieved fromhttp://www.jstor.org/stable/40158943

Phang, J. (2015, June 23). The Mary Sue Interview: Advantageous’ Jennifer Phang. (L. Coffin, Interviewer). The Mary Sue. Retrieved ftomhttp://themarysue. com/the-mary-sue-interview-advantagesus-jennifer-phang/

Rutten, T. (2008, January 30). L.A.’s Blade Runner Plans. The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved fromhttp://articles.latimes.com/2008/jan/30/opinion/oe-rutten30

Semerene, D. (2015, June 24). Advantageous. Slant Magazine. Retrieved fromhttp://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/advantageous

Schulman, S. (2012). The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. 2012.Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Phang, J. (Writer), ＆ Phang, J. (Director). (2012). Advantageous [Television Broadcast]. J. D. Thompson (Producer). Future States. United States : ITVS.

Ueno, Toshiya. Japanimation and Techno-Orientalism (n.d.). Retrieved September 15, 2016.http://www.t0.or.at/ueno/japan.htm

Wong, K. (2000). On the Edge of Spaces: “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell”, and Hong Kong’s Cityscape. Science Fiction Studies, 27(1), 1–21. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4240846

Yu, Timothy. (2008). Oriental Cities, Postmodern Futures: “Naked Lunch”, “Blade Runner”, and “Neuro-mancer”. Melius, 33(4). 45-71. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20343507

Documents

Disadvantageous: Gentrification and The Cyberpunk …...（ 169 ） （ 168 ） Disadvantageous: Gentrification and The Cyberpunk Aesthetic 103 and unemployment is at 45 percent (Thompson

Disadvantageous: Gentrification and The Cyberpunk …...（ 169 ）（ 168 ） Disadvantageous: Gentrification and The Cyberpunk Aesthetic 103 and unemployment is at 45 percent (Thompson