I have seen a Nancy Davis movie, from before Nancy married Ronald Reagan. Not many people can say they have, but she was in a movie called East Side, West Side with Barbara Stanwyck and James Mason, and how can I resist? So I watched it. I think I might actually own Hellcats of the Navy, the movie she made with Reagan, but I haven’t watched it. I’m considerably more interested in her brief movie career than in his rather longer one, perhaps because I’ve seen enough of his movies to know for sure that, no, he wasn’t a terribly good actor.

But I didn’t write an obituary of her when she died, and not just because she only made eleven movies, back in the ’40s and ’50s. I didn’t write an obituary of her because I didn’t trust myself to remain apolitical. I know some pretty awful stuff about her personally, but it all ties into her politics, and I don’t think that’s the sort of thing I should bring into an obituary.

Actually, with the exception of feminism, I try not to bring politics into my writing for this site at all. I don’t know who most celebrities vote for, and I don’t care. As long as he isn’t out campaigning, it’s no more my business who Tom Hanks is voting for than who my neighbour is voting for. And I have to tell you, I like Tom Hanks more than I like a lot of my neighbours. I’m sure he probably donates more of his money to his chosen candidates than anyone who lives around here, but he’s not high on my list of people whose money I’d like out of politics.

With that said, I also know that it’s impossible for me to avoid having my political beliefs influence my thoughts about movies. If you have strong political beliefs of any kind, that’s just true. So it may not just be that Bedtime for Bonzo is a ridiculous movie or that Knute Rockne, All American is not exactly designed to appeal to people who don’t care about football. It’s that, yes, I look at Ronald Reagan as an actor and think of what he would go on to do as governor of my home state and of President of my nation. In his case, and in Nancy’s, and in a few other cases along those lines, I should think it literally impossible not to think of their political connections.

And that’s fine. It really is. You acknowledge it, and you move on. You try to be as objective as possible as a critic and film writer despite the awareness that no human is truly objective. Or you don’t, and you write politically charged work that acknowledges your biases. At least, I think those are the things you do if you’re honest; you can also write politically charged stuff that claims to be objective, but I think usually the only people you’re fooling are yourself and the people who completely agree with you, and maybe not even them. After all, there’s a documentarian I agree with most of the time and still can’t stand as a filmmaker.

So why didn’t I acknowledge my feelings about Nancy Reagan, and her husband, and write the obituary anyway? For one thing, while I don’t believe in “speak no ill of the dead,” I also don’t believe someone’s obituary is the time to slam them. And since I’m not getting paid to write obituaries, I just chose not to write one at all. I won’t be writing one about Tom Cruise, if he dies while I’m still volunteering my writing of obituaries, because what I would write would be a jig on his grave. I think it’s inappropriate.

For another, there are few subjects that piss people off like politics. I grant you that the first piece I wrote for this site was about religion, which is not better in that department, but it was, like my pieces about feminism, a very personal piece. An immediate personal issue. If I were writing about a film by Dinesh D’Souza, I’d talk about his politics, because he is alive and making movies (bad ones, by all accounts) right now. Nancy Reagan? Regardless of how much power she did or didn’t have as First Lady, she hasn’t been First Lady since before some of our contributors were born. The Reagans’ legacy is lasting, for good or ill, but that’s no reason to go into detail about it here and now.