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According to some literary scholars, one book shifted American cinema and literature away from the simplistic categories of the good hero vs. evil villain. Up until 1969 when Mario Puza’s Godfather was published, the typical story in American Cinema was the Western, which always had a clear-cut right and wrong character. The Untouchables had been written, but it depicted the mobsters and gangsters as completely evil. Puza instead shows the complexities of the gangster. The Godfather, Don Vito Corleone, does clearly awful things, but he also helps many helpless people. He brings justice to the unpunished thugs who beat up an innocent Italian girl. He saves the poor single mother from being homeless. The Don is a “bad guy” who isn’t all bad. The Godfather makes us rethink our simplistic categories of good and evil. He makes us wrestle with the complexities of imperfect people. Reality will not let us clearly define people as categorically good or bad. Ironically, our relatively new phenomenon of reality TV is quite antiquated because it tends to clearly define people as good or bad. To no ones surprise its not really that real. No people in life are all bad. And no people in life are all good. Scripture seems to witness to the same reality of flawed heroes and sympathetic villains. People are all imperfect characters some just seem to be closer to being heroes and other closer to being villains.