Part postmodern parable, part political pamphlet; part parody of media culture, part exercise in media literacy; part historical revisionism, part fairy tale in the tradition of Back to the Future, Through the Looking Glass and The Wizard of Oz, part biblical retelling; part family saga, part coming- of-age dramedy; part 1950s domestic sitcom, part 1940s film noir; part family melodrama, part something else altogether: pleasant and peaceful though it may seem, the fictitious 1950s sitcom suburb Pleasantville which provides the setting for Gary Ross's 1998 film of the same name, is, quite literally, a battleground of themes, tropes, genres and critical debates. When the teenagers David (Tobey Maguire) and Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) are magically zapped into Pleasantville, their progressive mores soon conflict with the conservative principles of the 1950s domestic sitcom. As they try to liberate the town from its generic restraints and emancipate its inhabitants from their scripted roles, the town becomes a combat zone of genres and styles. On Main Street, 1940s film noir battles with the small-town movie; at the local soda shop, Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl, 1935) clashes with Catcher in the Rye (Salinger, 1951); while at home, the 1950s domestic sitcom tussles with Sirkian family melodrama. In this chapter I discuss how these discourses influence, and are influenced by, the nature of the suburban fictional world – that is, the ontology of the semantic universe which is at once the consequence of, and the precondition for, the suburban narrative.