Harvester and the American Reaper

“The suburbs dream of violence,” says J.G. Ballard in Kingdom Come. I think about this line far more than is probably healthy, because it feels like an inescapable reality.

While I spent most of my adolescence out in a small home in the country, circumstances have since relocated me into the beating heart of surburbia, in a bedroom community at the foot of the mountains. It’s a place that is, sometimes, disarmingly kind – strangers wave at you on the street, offer passing comments on the weather or that they like your hat. But it’s all plastic in a way that’s hard to parse beyond vibes. Many of my neighbors are of the type who retreat back inside, curl up on the sofa next to their gun cabinet, and wordlessly long for the right to murder those damned Antifas’n’Co.

This juxtaposition is pervasively nauseating, because there’s a strange tendency in (neo)liberal America to baby and coddle the vulnerabilities and paranoia of these people, as well as to enshrine this unspecific longing to wind the clock back to a better, simpler America. Our current Administration in particular finds itself with this juvenile fetish, posting memes (possibly AI) of red corvettes and glass-bottle Coke while promising a return to something that was never real. Again, even the liberal types who claim to be anti-fascist will express some longing for simpler times, for an America that was “undivided… when we were all Americans!” 

This is, to put it politely, utter fucking nonsense borne entirely of white privilege and ignorance.

Nascent forms of culture are subject to being seen as wholly divisive, and it is a trend that goes back all the way to the days of Socrates. At the time, Socrates feared writing would corrupt the youth into being unable to orate their thoughts with the same tenacity. In America, fears run amok that culture will be devoured by anything new: Radio plays and exposure to jazz (read as “blackness”) would drive the youth to madness, Television would do the same, then comics, then videogames and Dungeons and Dragons, then smartphones and now TikTok and social media.

All vehicles of culture have their caveats, of course, but to suggest we are in anything but a reticent cycle of moral panic misses the point. Some faux crises are just more influential and coercive than others.

Harvester, released to very mild fanfare in 1996, is among my favorite commentaries on these themes, at once a reflection on “Violence-as-Entertainment” and its aftereffects and a commentary on the old world that so many of these fogeys want to regress to.

Allow me to provide a very brief summary: Steve Mason wakes up in the barren American town Harvest (pop. 50) at some undetermined point in the 1950s. Sensing the unease and tension beneath the surface of Americana, he is instructed by the citizenry en masse to join the “Lodge of the Harvest Moon,” whose criteria for membership progress from esoteric to outwardly antisocial. Early in the week, Steve is made to scratch an old man’s nice new car to punish him for the sin of Pride. By the end of the week, Steve is being directed to set fire to buildings, to kill, and to treat the citizens of Harvest like meaningless pixels.

They are, of course, but it is also true in-universe. The game’s twist is that Harvest is a simulation intended to turn young men into serial killers, to make solipsism the prime social theorem. It’s not subtle in the slightest, so tongue-in-cheek that it can sometimes be irritating. It’s also a very clunky game that can be quite obtuse, which makes its commentary far less accessible.

In my small town, though, I’ve met a number of people like the digital citizens of Harvest: single-minded, spiteful, small people who treat you with a distant derision the moment you try to indulge the sin of empathy for someone who doesn’t deserve it. Violence is a terrible thing to indulge, a terrible thing for media to “sponsor,” but there’s also a belief held that blood sacrifices are an essential part of our country. “Where would America be,” asks a citizen of Harvest, “without the [genocide of Native Americans] to get us this land?”

It’s a rhetorical question, but the ethos is something that ricochets in my mind, both in reference to the dead little town of Harvest and in our real America: What else can these suburbs breed but little sociopaths? Socialization beyond the surface level exposes vulnerabilities – our relationships with others are only defined by what we can gain from them. Greed is good and good is second to greed. Children are kept away from one another, taught to fear the outside world, and at the same time taught that being American imbues them with an inherent moral righteousness.

To be a proud American is to constantly condone the legacies of violence and bloodshed that still haunt us.

Steve doesn’t have a choice but to meet the demands of the Lodge, not when the alternative is nebulous between death or a life wasted in a dead-end job – which to me also reads as a vague metaphor to the escalation of rhetoric and motivation within our military. “Be kind, be efficient, and have a plan to kill everyone you meet,” say the Marines. The Satanic Panics seem to have the effect of convincing some people that our moral goodness is ingrained and constantly in danger from external forces, but it is our excuses for the harm we cause that allows for myopia.

Should Steve commit a crime, he is arrested by the Harvest Police Department, but the illusion of justice falters quickly. He’s scolded – not for the crime itself, but for indulging the antisocial impulse with witnesses around. Harvest operates on a three-strike rule for all crime, but even the larger ones can be paid off or fall beneath notice. Murder the “right” people – and not a soul will care.

I shouldn’t need to draw attention to the historical parallels here – though the only thing really stopping me is a respect for a word count.

There are a dozen other ways that Harvest shows the ingrained violence of the American experiment, such as failing to bring a paper to the paperboy will result in being gunned down on our front porch or that our own mother can blow us away with a shotgun as a “justified” punishment for interrupting her (let’s just say, domme side-gig). Instead of raising money via bake sales to help vagrants and homeless people, the money instead goes to a fund to cremate and destroy the evidence of violence enacted upon the less dead.

If you pick a decade, you can find a similar juxtaposition between the propaganda of American good and the reality of American cruelty. I’ll make it easy: Ronald Reagan gets deified even by the liberals as “one of our best, one of the good ones,” and parlayed to the same hollow nostalgia we’re suffocating under now. This is the same man who laughed and was complicit in the deaths of millions of Americans of HIV/AIDS because at least half of them were queer, who quite literally supported housing segregation, who ignited the war on drugs that facilitated the progression of our surveillance state and the justification of police violence, and who committed high treason by selling weapons to insurgents in exchange for crack cocaine to airdrop into inner cities. And these are simply the first things I can think of while writing this piece. I am certain, in that decade alone, I could find novels worth of indiscriminate cruelty masked with a smiling white man promising to Make It Great Again.

In Harvester, again as on-the-nose as possible, Friday’s Blood Drive is a euphemism for harvesting all of the blood in one’s body. Via decapitation. Steve Mason either learns to be the Reaper or defaults to the reaped. Kindness gives him nothing in America but the betrayal of those toothless small town ideals.

It’s alright, though, just a result of the dog-eat-dog world.

Only the worthy should get the right to blood – and anyone who says otherwise is a dirty commie.

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J.M. Henson is a freelance critic/author who haunts the Blue Ridge Mountains and is in turn haunted by most things out of their control. Follow on Bluesky.