It’s one of the biggest mysteries in cinema: Stallone knows how to use 3 shells from Demolition Man!

As the iconic Demolition Man celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, we take a look at a very specific element of the film that has long captured audiences’ imaginations and remains one of cinema’s unsolved mysteries.

In this action-packed sci-fi feature film from director Sylvester Stallone, cop John Spartan, cryogenically frozen for a “senseless murder,” awakens in 2032 to find a seemingly idyllic society free of crime and violence.

In this futuristic world where cars fly and bad words are punished with fines, citizens don’t use toilets like they used to. Indeed, as a completely stunned John the Spartan discovers, the good old toilet paper has been replaced by… three shells!

Three shells of seafood wait quietly near the bowl, placed on top of the bowl where we used to find the traditional roll.

In Marco Brambilla’s film, the Spartan gets out of this bad situation by uttering a series of obscenities and using a ticket slip to satisfy nature. But nothing tells us how it would have behaved if it had had to use known shells.

Since the release of the feature film, of course, fans have come up with their own theories on the subject and have been trying to figure out the mystery on the forums for a long time. Even if there is no official explanation for this issue, Sylvester Stallone revealed his solution in 2006 on the site. It’s not cool (transmission by Screenwriter):

“Okay, this may be bordering on the grotesque, but the scriptwriter explained it to me like this: You hold two shells like chopsticks, gently pull and scrape away what’s left of the third. You asked for it, you got it! “he explained.

“You have to imagine the bidet”Mysteriously added by Sandra Bullock in 2013 MTV. “There are always multiple processes. You have number 1, number 2, and then clean up.”

As you can imagine, unfortunately no one has clear and precise instructions on this topic, and this is what creates all the humor of the scene.

As for how the three seashells were invented, screenwriter Daniel Waters explained during a Q&A on the topic. Reddit That he wondered how toilets could be decorated in a futuristic way, and that one of his colleagues on the phone described a small bag of shells sitting on his toilet.

It is enough to imagine one of the most famous scenes of Demolition Man.

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