Reinventing the wheel of geekdom from its John Hughes iteration in Weird Science (and, of course, long before in every cinematic production of Frankenstein), Kehlani has taken the opportunity of transforming her own version of “The Monster” into a lesbian romance–with a seemingly bisexual love triangle thrown in at the end for good measure.
And yet, in true futuristic fashion, the cyborg’s aims ultimately have nothing to do with love so much as cold-blooded killing and light world domination. Still, she plays a good “mindless” (somewhat literally) robot for a time, as Kehlani is made to believe she might actually be interested in her, as opposed to what’s inside of her. To that point, the cyborg creepily instead of tenderly presses her hand onto Kehlani’s heart when they’re in bed together as a flood of personal memories flows from Kehlani through the cyborg. Conversely, when Kehlani does the same to her build-a-girlfriend concept, she sees and feels nothing behind that steely exterior except the silhouette of herself.
Which is precisely why she’s a goddamn fool to have gone to sleep long enough to let the cyborg weirdly touch her on the chest once more as director Bo Mirosseni abruptly cuts to our diabolical paramour pushing an unconscious Kehlani out to an area near the fireplace in the living room, methodically affixing wires to her as we anticipate something truly horrendous on the horizon for the very woman who made the mistake of saving this monster–this soulless thing, as it were.
While the lyrics of “Nights Like This” largely express a mistrustful disappointment in Kehlani’s object of affection (including “You gon’ get my hopes high, girl/Just gon’ tell me more lies, girl”), the underlying message of the video is that love in the twenty-first century is not a commodity so much as a liability. An Achilles’ heel that leads to the sort of vulnerability that could cost one the actual loss of their consciousness (not that you don’t already have to be somewhat unconscious in the first place to be in love). It’s after the cyborg gets her way with Kehlani by possessing her that Ty Dolla $ign materializes again to deliver his verses (after all, he’s always been overly fond of collaborations) only to become another piece of intended collateral in the cyborg’s uploading of memories and subsequent murder. What will this modern pansexual Frankenstein do once she’s collected the memories of any lover that she uses to transfer into a different body? Lord knows, ’cause, like, I can barely handle my own fucking memories let alone a massive collection of other people’s. But I guess that makes one the unthinkable: not a cyborg…yet.
