For a supenseful, gut wrenching, teeth clenching movie experience it’s hard to top 12.7 hours, currently being considered for an Oscar nomination. It’s a story of determination, faith and courage and while everyone knows the outcome before even buying a ticket, at least half the audience can closely identify with the anguish of the protagonist.
The events depicted in the movie are well known and documented: a lone hiker chooses to ignore a “Closed for the Season” sign at a rest area in Moab, Utah, and suffers unspeakable horror as a result when his penis becomes frozen to a urinal in the stark, concrete block rest room. Ryan Rollins, the hiker, who actually served as a consultant during the making of the film agreed that the script captured the mood of the situation and added that he was eager to see the movie produced as a cautionary tale for those rugged individualists who think that the rules don’t apply to them.
“As a child I had managed to get my tongue stuck to frozen items on two separate occasions. Once to a flag pole on the playground in sixth grade and then again to the carcass of a dead moose during hunting season when I was 30. My buddies had ‘double-dog’ dared me, when we encountered the partially decomposed animal while hunting, and being rugged and proud I couldn’t very well walk away now, could I?” Rollins went on to describe the terror of being on all fours with his tongue effectively glued to the anus of what had once surely been a magnificent animal for several hours before being rescued by a park ranger who later sold the story to the producers of MTV’s “Jackass”.
In the movie, we suffer along with Rollins as his urge to urinate in the desolate landscape builds with each passing moment. We sense his relief as the deserted restroom comes into view with the wind driven sleet letting up just long enough for him to spot the facility, squatting on a frozen bluff above the Mongoloid River. When Rollins brushes aside the “Closed for the Season” sign, we identify with his bravado, which recalls the actions of the reluctant vigilante in “Death Wish”. A hush falls over the audience as the surround sound captures the sound of that zipper coming down, the emergence of Ryan’s pink tool, the welcome gush of urine… and then the shock as the tip of Ryan’s penis contacts the lip of the urinal. Every male in the theater involuntarily crosses his legs as Ryan struggles against Mother Nature, who has his foreskin firmly in her grasp.
Some reviewers have seen this spine tingling moment as an Oedipal metaphor, Ryan desperately pulling away from his clinging mother who just won’t let go, while others see it as nothing more than what it appears to be: stupidity being caught with its pants down, so to speak.
What follows in the unfolding plot has earned the film an R rating, not to mention gasps of dismay and episodes of fainting among members of the audience. Ryan’s discovery of a rusted razor blade among the cobwebs on a nearby shelf offers up salvation and at the same time, grim realization that the man who leaves that isolated restroom will never be the same.