Frodo, Mid-Life Crisis, Trumpian Sycophants, Macbeth, and Meatballs

The trigger for my ”mid-life crisis” came in December 2003, when I saw Frodo’s ending scenes in the epic movie trilogy of The Lord of the Rings. I was 41 years old.

Frodo of course is a hobbit, a human-like but diminutive creature, living in the bucolic Shire (think of a gorgeous English countryside like the Cotswalds.) The Shire is a small, obscure section of Tolkien’s universe of Middle-Earth, blessedly unimportant until the all-powerful One Ring comes into Frodo’s possession. He must destroy it before it can be seized by Sauron, the dread leader of the evil forces of Middle Earth. The Ring brings unparalleled power and can corrupt anyone who possesses it or even comes near it.

Frodo resists, barely, the power of the Ring and with the help of various wizards, elves, dwarves, humans, animate trees, and a few best hobbit friends, he brings it to the only place it can be destroyed, the hell fires of Sauron’s home in Mordor. In so doing, Frodo saves the Shire and all of Middle Earth. Along the way, Frodo is attacked by all manner of monsters and endures great physical and psychic pain.

Eleven hours of (extended version) movie greatness later, Frodo and his friends finally return home to the Shire, their heroic and dire adventures successfully concluded. They go to their usual pub to have an ale and soak in the good cheer. But Frodo’s forlorn eyes give him away. He can’t enjoy his return to a normal and pleasant life. The old Frodo is effectively gone, erased by what he’s seen and what he’s done.  With a sadness that haunts me still, he rattles around in his comfortable old hobbit hole as if lost and says, “…there is no going back.”

After Frodo has saved the world, living out his days in the Shire would have seemed like a slow, dull death. This being fiction, Frodo does not waste away or set out on some lesser and perhaps foolish quest. Instead, he sails off with his Elvish friends and the wizard Gandalf to far-off magical lands.  

As for me, after the movie was done, I took a taxi back to our hotel with my family from the theater in West Palm Beach. I was mystified as to why I felt sad enough to feel tears gathering.

Looking back, I think the movie’s end awakened a sudden realization that not only had my youthful dreams of large-scale, heroic glory slipped away, but that with them gone and with each passing year, I was losing more and more of the “old me. With an emotional force made more potent by being unprepared for it, I felt Frodo’s sadness as if I was a fellow mourner of both his vanished past and of my own. His sadness merged with mine. There was “no going back” for me either.

My sadness was the most commonplace of clichés, the fortysomething midlife crisis. It would have helped me to know that life satisfaction, expressed along a horizontal axis of age, is an elongated U shape, bottoming out for most people around forty or forty-five and then rising steadily every year after.

My sadness scared me. From the outside, I had the blessings of a loving and beloved family and a successful career. “Something’s lost and something’s gained in living every day,” Joni Mitchell sings, but for a while I felt only the losses, and none of the gains. And that filled me with sorrow until people helped me overcome it. (I think I was depressed, but depression is a loaded word, so I hesitate to claim it definitively.)

Frodo and my sorrow came to mind after reading two terrific and highly recommended recent articles in The Atlantic: Bart Gellman’s “What Happened to Michael Flynn” and Mark Leibovich’s “The Most Pathetic Men in America”(spoiler alert:  Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy). The articles explore why these men have thrown their lot in with Trump and by doing so thrown away their legacy.

Frodo supplies one answer. Once you experience relevance on a large stage in a role that defines you, there is no going back to your life before. Before he was a disgraced National Security Advisor, Mike Flynn was a war hero at the highest level. Now he’s the main act in a travelling MAGA carnival show. Kevin McCarthy is likely to become Speaker of the House, post the midterms. Lindsey Graham will likely be the senator from South Carolina until he dies. For all these men, it seems that remaining on some big stage is necessary for a relevance that not only defines their existence, but also acts like the One Ring; the more they wear it, the more it corrupts them with a moral sickness and a mortal fear of losing relevance.

And the key to avoiding that loss is their continued access to Donald Trump and his support. No backup plan for Flynn, McCarthy, and Graham of Elvish friends with a ship ready to sail to a magic land; instead, all they have are airplanes to take them to Mar-A-Lago or wherever Trump may be. They kiss Trump’s ‘ring’ as often as they’re able, no matter how self-loathing, small, and twisted each kiss might make them feel. They’ve placed all the chips of their relevance/self-esteem on something as uncontrollable and mercurial as Donald Trump’s patronage. In this way, they’ve surrendered their agency over their own fate. They’re addicted in an extraordinarily self-debasing way.

At some point, the spell may break, and they may encounter an existential crisis from which they will be too old and too broken to recover.

I suppose my ordinary mid-life fortysomething depressive state could also be called an existential crisis. I think of that sort of crisis as doubting the purpose of one’s existence.

For me, thoughts like that can lead down a dangerously toxic rabbit hole.

A weird defense I’ve discovered is Absurdism. Measured by the scale of anything like time or the universe, what we are and what we do are absurdly insignificant. Camus defined the Absurd as the “confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

Weirdly again, I find Absurdist comfort in one of Shakespeare’s most famous and somber quotes. It’s said by Macbeth as he is losing everything: his kingship, his wife, his life.  

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Grim, certainly, but context matters. In these lines, Macbeth finds comfort in the absurd insignificance of any life, including his own.

A more nuanced view of Absurdism is expressed by Bill Murray in “Meatballs” chanting,” It just doesn’t matter!” (Clip below.)

Ultimately, my takeaway from Frodo and the diseased Trump sycophants and Absurdism is to think carefully before you slip on that One Ring, whatever that may be for any of us. Some people can never take it off. And those that can remove it need something else that’s magical to fall back on. A ship bound for a magical land will do; so will a loving family and the wisdom of growing old.