A woman suffers an infidelity that breaks her ideal family. Her husband is famous, she is an artist and she must react because the rumors will soon be in the news. It could be Shakira, but it’s about Nora Ephron, who went through something similar forty years earlier. What advice would her mother give her in the face of such betrayal? she wondered then. “Take note,” and that’s exactly what she did. Four years later she published heartburnthe novel that narrates their separation and would catapult her to be one of the best romantic comedy writers in the history of cinema.
It is worth clarifying that her husband was not only famous: he was a national hero. The journalist Carl Bernstein, together with Bob Woodward, was the one who uncovered the Watergate scandal that impeached President Nixon. Did he get mad because of his ex’s book? Of course yes. “He cheated on me and then behaves as if I were the one who betrayed him,” she unloads in the prologue. Not that she didn’t know that she was a writer! What did he think she was going to happen?”. We could ask Piqué the same. After all, Shakira is known worldwide for letting off steam in songs. “We all have our own processes for dealing with grief. In my case, writing music is like going to the psychiatrist, only cheaper”, said the Colombian artist in the magazine elle.
In heartburn (the cake is overin the translation of Anagrama), the first thing the character does when “seeing the jam almost empty” is to leave town with his son in tow and join his old editor to rewrite his cooking column. She was seven months pregnant, and she was worried about gossip. Her friend Betty, scandalously gossipy, suspected infidelity when she saw a wife with shaved legs in winter. If in the seventies public humiliation was a latent threat, what to say today, when they don’t even talk behind your back: you can read what the whole world says on social networks. At first, Shakira appeared as a hurt and respectful woman before the separation. Everything changed with the Bizarrap session.
Women who bill
The proposal of the music producer is to create songs at the moment, and Maybe that’s why Shakira’s response is a bit crude in relation to its best successes, but the controversy seems exaggerated: that it has no sisterhood, that good art does not come out of spite, that Casio is not such a bad watch… The truth is that Bizarrap had already made a profit from the controversy when Residente attacked to J Balvin, and the formula exploded again with a debate that branches out in multiple directions.
“Except in extreme cases, speaking ill of your ex is speaking ill of yourself. Nobody is ten years old and has two children with an asshole, except another asshole”, Juan Sklar tweeted, encouraging criticism. And he has a point, because accusing Piqué of looking for a simple girl like him sounds contradictory, taking into account that she previously chose the guy who works his muscles more than his head. The cliché of a man who would rather be admired than challenged serves to justify himself, but the comparison gives him an air of superiority that doesn’t sit well with him. Of course Shakira has what, and while the sentiment is genuine, perhaps it has more to do with where she said it.
Bizarrap comes from Freestyle and Trap, one of the few strongholds of art where you can still be rebellious, sexist and enlarged without risking being cancelled. Although Shakira is a pop star, she seems to appropriate the genre in this collaboration. Something is turned upside down when toxic masculinity shoots out of the mouths of female rappers like Young MA and Nicki Minaj, who have managed to break through in an industry of men camouflaging themselves as them. Shakira doesn’t get that far, but when she attacks her lover, she is criticized for not being in tune with the times. The feminist revolution came to propose something else. However, it is customary for her to use betrayal as fuel. Silence would be a form of submission. As Nora will say, as acid as the title of her book: “Show me a woman who cries when a tree loses leaves in the fall and I’ll show you a stupid one.”
If you want to cry, don’t cry
How to avoid being a victim when the facts place you in that role? In the series I may destroy you, Michaela Coel turns the issue around after being raped. She imagines all the possible futures -killing her victimizer, deconstructing him and even empathizing with him- to understand that there is no possible happy ending. She just has to accept it. And, in her case, make an incredible series. “If I tell the story, I control the version. I can make you laugh, and I prefer that before they feel sorry for me”, says Eprhon. It’s hard to sympathize with a woman who could adapt her novel into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. In the HBO documentary Everything Is Copy, his own son Jacob reveals that his parents’ divorce was delayed because Carl Bernstein demanded that Mike Nichols, the director, sign in front of a notary that they would not portray him as a bad guy.
Perhaps the best response to public humiliation is to enjoy yourself in public, like Meg Ryan’s iconic orgasm in the restaurant. How did Nora go from suffering such a heartbreak to becoming the queen of rom-coms? You have to believe in love after a great disappointment, and that’s exactly what it’s all about when harry met sally: they are two heartbroken people who become friends because they don’t dare to fall in love. At the premiere of the film, almost a decade had passed since her separation and the screenwriter had married again, but she never forgot the pain. The same felt by director Rob Reiner, who was coming off a bad divorce with director Penny Marshall. The film then is the result of two points of view on the same pain. In the original ending, Harry and Sally didn’t end up together, but fortunately Reiner fell in love during filming, changing the outcome and giving us the best romantic comedy of all time. A beacon of hope for Shakira, who keeps her heart in a safe deposit box after she is shot in the chest with a bazooka in the Monotonía video clip.
three songs for a crime
Until now Shakira’s responses to Piqué were three. First came I congratulate you, where she applauded him for acting so well and sang to him: “Your wound did not open my skin, but it did open my eyes.” Then Monotonía arrived, where she was hurt and reflected that the routine had killed them. With Bizarrap he left the nuances aside and in a vengeful way he found his place of comfort. We don’t know if the songs show a progression of their grief, but according to Ephron, “betrayal doesn’t hurt when getting out of a relationship because it offers a simple and clear narrative where one person did something so horrible and unforgivable that the other is immediately cleared of everything.” sin”. Of course, not all genres ask for the same thing: suffering is better suited to a ballad and with Bizarrap it is convenient to vent, but his anger exposes it to a certain extent.
Ten years after composing You oughta know, Alanis Morisette regretted taking the end of her relationship with comedian David Couiler in such a personal way: “I listen to anger as a protection from my vulnerability. I was devastated. It was easier to feel the power of my anger than to be the broken woman lying on the floor.” Nora took it out on her by revealing to anyone who would listen the identity of Deep Throat, the secret source of her ex-husband in the Watergate scandal. No one believed him, until the FBI’s own Mark Felt came forward in 2005. “My religion is: get over it. They say that with time the pain is forgotten. It is the cliché of childbirth: the pain is forgotten. I do not share that opinion. I remember the pain. What is actually forgotten is love”.
Shakira and Piqué’s love was out of a movie. She opened the 2010 World Cup by singing and a month later she brought home a world champion. Until I can forget it, the writer’s advice is to use humor as an antidote: “One of the things that makes me most proud is that I was able to turn an event that was terribly tragic for me into a comedy. And if that’s not fiction, I don’t know what is. Surely not enough time has passed for Shakira to be able to laugh at herself, but at least she can laugh at Piqué. In the magazine elle He said: “When I felt that I lacked strength, as if I had no legs, those days I wrote songs, and I felt that I was revived and came out stronger.” The mention of being left without legs is a subtle and accurate dart. She left the relationship right in time, before Piqué’s post-retirement depression falls on top of his mid-forties crisis, and he did it with a song that has already had 145 million views on YouTube, which is no small thing.
*Recognized author and screenwriter of the series “Punto de Quiebre”, among many other achievements.
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