How did the "three seashells" work in Demolition Man?

Question

I know that this was really just meant to be a joke in the movie, but that makes me wonder: why seashells, and how are they supposed to work?

Did the writers just pick out an absurd word at random, or did they actually have something in mind that got cut from the final version?

Tango · Accepted Answer

Any description here is going to border on the crude and will offend at least one person out there, so here it is, in spoiler notation (don't blame me if you mouse-over it!):

I have to add that I was disappointed with this, since it didn't use any kind of future technology.  Before I read this, I always thought it would have something to do with ionic charges and attracting/repelling anything in the area that wasn't attached (such as skin and hair).

A recent interview also revealed a (rather gross) origin of the idea out-of-universe: http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/nailbiter111/news/?a=112133

Shadow Wizard is Vaccinating · Answer

At December 2014, Daniel Waters (one of the screenplay writers of the movie) was asked about the seashells in Demolition Man and gave a decent reply: (warning: graphic language used!)

"There's a scene where Stallone has to use a restroom. I'm trying to come up with futuristic things you'd find in there. I was having trouble, so I called my buddy, another screenwriter across town, asked him if he had any ideas. Ironically enough that guy was taking a dump when he answered the phone, looked around his bathroom and said 'I have a bag of seashells on my toilet as a decoration?' I said 'Okay, I'll make something out of that'".

source

So, to sum this up nicely: the reason why seashells are used, and not something else, has two levels:

The writer has a friend who had (maybe still have) a bag of seashells on his toilet as a decoration.
When the writer called that friend to ask for ideas about future things in toilets, he was just using the toilets, thus the seashells caught his attention and he mentioned them.

Without any of those, we would have most likely gotten some boring thing like fancy bidet, which would be the obvious choice and wouldn't have raised any questions or discussions. :)

How did the "three seashells" work in Demolition Man?

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