This rocked me in a very not-good way. In part because I was fairly confident that this story point was inspired by the 1987 on-air suicide of Pennsylvania political figure R. Budd Dwyer. Footage of him taking his own life was, of course, edited for news reports, but I was at the time enough of a media insider that I was able to watch the unexpurgated footage of the suicide. And to this day, I wish I hadn’t. The similarities between the real-life event and what director Todd Philips staged struck me as too specific to be coincidental. I considered what Phillips and Phoenix (and, yes, De Niro) have done to be unforgivably opportunistic nihilism.