It's incredibly cruel - at least if LotR and Star Wars offer repetitive enactment of something, it's closure and achievement. To bury yourself so narcissistically in a repeated re-enactment of the tragedy of your own life is enormously sad and futile. It suggests that you can see no possible solution to the problem, so that the vicarious motif of its endless rehearsal is actually desirable rather than depressing. Bloody world we live in.