quiet quitting

Films about jobs that turn people into furniture: clock in, do exactly enough to get by, and let the fluorescent lights handle the rest.

The dumb version is at least funny about it. Peter Gibbons hates his job and his boss at Initech in Office Space, and a botched hypnotherapy session is the only thing that ever makes him stop caring, right as the company brings in consultants to downsize the place. Dante Hicks gets called into the convenience store on his day off in Clerks and spends it reading that his ex-girlfriend is getting married. Bud Baxter climbs the ladder at a huge New York insurance company in The Apartment by lending his flat out to executives for their affairs, which works right up until it doesn't.

Stick around a few more decades on the job, though, and the quiet quitting stops being funny. Kanji Watanabe has sat at the same government desk for thirty years in Ikiru before a cancer diagnosis sends him looking for a reason he ever did. Ryan Bingham flies around the country firing other people's employees for a living in Up in the Air, until a woman makes him take a hard look at a life spent entirely in airports. Low-level bureaucrat Sam Lowry escapes his own monotony through daydreams of heroism in Brazil, and one real case is all it takes to drag him into the machinery he was hiding from.

The meeting really could have been an email. So could most of a career.