It says something about me, I suppose, that the image that almost always pops into my head whenever someone says the magic words “Halle Berry” is the one from the classic 2001 cyber/anti-terrorist/kidnapping/deadbeat dad redemption thriller Swordfish. You know the shot I’m talking about – the one where Berry interrupts her topless poolside reading (presumably it was something by Po Bronson, or perhaps an Alice McDermott), in order to brief Hugh Jackman on the details of his role in John Travolta’s dastardly but arguably justified scheme to steal government money seized from evil drug dealers in order to finance a perpetual black ops war against terrorists.

It’s the breasts, of course, that stand out in the scene, but they wouldn’t be so memorable if not for the context. Or rather, they wouldn’t be so memorable if not for the almost aggressively obvious fact that there is no context. They’re purely gratuitous. They’re just there on the screen, like a Matisse hanging on the stark white contextless walls of a museum, for our delectation and wonderment.

Swordfish can’t even claim, as a movie like, say, Scream could, that it’s referencing or participating in a distinct cinematic tradition of gratuitous toplessness. The breasts are there solely because no one could resist the idea of Halle Berry topless.

Which is understandable.

What’s unexpected, though, is that there’s nothing else in the Halle Berry canon that can definitively trump that Swordfish moment as the iconic representation of Berry. She was memorable as the crack addict in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, but it was a small role and she was outdone in any case by Samuel L. Jackson’s crack addict. There’s that moment from the James Bond film Die Another Day when she walks out of the ocean in that orange bikini, but that’s a direct evocation—almost a frame-by-frame duplication—of the scene made famous by Ursula Andress in the Bond movie Dr. No, and in any case her transgressive re-invention of the scene was rendered totally passe by Daniel Craig’s transgressively homoerotic reinvention of that very same scene in the re-make of Casino Royale. And everyone knows she got x-tra naked doing the dirty with Billy Bob Thornton in Monster’s Ball, but what everybody remembers about that film is her touching but over-the-top acceptance speech after she won the Oscar for it for best actress.

The surprising truth is that despite her superstardom, her best actress Oscar, her status as the best-paid black female actress in Hollywood and the consensus opinion that she’s one of the important actresses of her generation, Halle Berry has managed to make more than 20 movies, many of them immensely profitable and/or critically acclaimed, without imprinting pop culture with much of anything other than the fact of Halle Berry’s extraordinary, indescribable, breathtaking beauty. Which is kind of strange when you really think about it.

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