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Lizards in Movies   The Terminator (1984)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This science-fiction classic is basically a monster movie in which a Cyborg relentlessly chases a woman until she finally kills him. It stars Arnold Scharzenegger, who famously speaks only 17 lines in the movie, and Linda Hamilton. In 2029, after defense network computers got so smart they started a nuclear war (really?) the remaining people in the skull-covered ruins of L.A. live in filthy underground places where they eat rats and where, and this is far worse, there's nothing to watch on TV. They spend most of their time fighting gigantic hunting-and-killing machines which built themselves in automated factories after the world was nuked (seriously?) to fight the human slaves who rebelled against the machines. Right when the humans have almost defeated them, the machines suddenly develop time-travel technology (really?) and send a Cyborg that looks and talks like an Austrian bodybuilder back in time to 1984. His job is to kill Sarah Connor before she can give birth to John Connor, the leader of the human resistance army. (I would have bought plenty of Microsoft and Apple stock and placed some big super bowl bets, myself.) The resistance army then sends a soldier with a fancy 1984 haircut to protect Sarah. Then they destroy the time travel machine so he can't come back (seriously?) (The time travel machine is somehow working again 7 years later when the first sequel is made.) If this all hasn't made you dizzy yet, wait until you find out that time-traveling soldier Kyle hooked up with Sarah and he's the father of John Connor who was born before Kyle who died long before Connor was born.... Ugh! This is why I hate time-travel movies. The lizard scenes: Sarah works as a waitress and lives with her roommate Ginger and a pet iguana named Pugsley. We first see the iguana when the two women are preparing for their Friday night dates. Sarah notices that Pugsley is not in his cage and searches for him while listening to recorded telephone messages on what smart-phone-deprived people in the 1980s called a "telephone answering machine." She finds Pugsley on a high shelf and brings him down as she listens to a man's voice message telling her that he's cancelling his date with her. She changes into casual clothing and tells Ginger she's going out to see a movie. (Because people in movies always go to movies and people in books always read books, etc.) We know little about Sarah so the lizard scene does a good job of introducing her to us - she's young and single, hoping to find a boyfriend, she's a loving caregiver, she's unconventional (instead of a cat or dog she keeps a lizard, which was not as common in 1984 as it became later). She's also able to keep a positive attitude after disappointment. These are all qualities she will need down the road as a single mother survivor of a nuclear war when she becomes what she later calls "the mother of the future." As the movie progresses we see that she also has the smarts, the strength, and the stamina for the job. We see the iguana again later that night after Ginger gets out of bed to make a sandwich with new wave music blasting through headphones plugged into what people in the 1980s called a "portable cassette player." Pugsley knocks something off the top of the refrigerator and startles Ginger who yells at him, threatening to make a belt out of him. Then things get really violent, but fortunately I can ignore that because there's no lizard in it.