The latest suicidal-killer unpleasantness reminded me of a remarkable film I saw nearly 50 years ago: Don Levy's "Herostratus", about a bad poet who plans to commit suicide and milk the event for all the PR it's worth, only to have the PR industry chew him up and spit him out.

http://www.laweekly.com/film/herostratus-suicide-as-self-promotion-2163938

http://nightflight.com/18-year-old-helen-mirren-selling-rubber-gloves-in-1967s-herostratus/

Levy's career went nowhere, the film seems to have been a personal catastrophe for a lot of the people involved in making it, and it disappeared into cultic obscurity. But there's never been another film like it: I didn't understand it much at all at the time, but I've had flashbacks from it ever since. And what Levy's ad-industry manipulators were doing anticipates what the handlers of political suicide attackers do today; he had no precedent to refer to.

It's been available again for a few years now. I'd be interested to hear what anybody else makes of it.