Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

You hear a lot about helicopter parenting these days. The term refers to the tendency of contemporary parents to monitor and assist their adorable little meat spores at every micro-stage of their development — to cajole and fertilize and prune them, like anthropomorphic bonsai trees. I’ve dated a few products of helicopter parenting. Odd experience. The girls were both hyper-confident and exceedingly fragile; they were glittering yet brittle, like people made of glass. I think this was largely because their sense of self was based almost entirely on external validation — on the attention they received from parents and teachers and boyfriends. And so they were like overgrown teacher’s pets, constantly striving for the comforting buzz of an A-plus grade or a silver star, and yet never quite knowing why. In their lack of introspection and basic feeling for others, they scarcely resembled people at all.

I think that’s partly why I find this ad for Google’s Chrome to be so loaded. Have a look:

Done? First things first: if you cried while watching this, or even got a bit misty-eyed, click here and leave this blog right now. You are clearly too evolved for Uncouth Reflections.

. . .

Okay, for those of you still here: what did you make of the ad? If you’re as crude and as unfeeling as I am, you probably found it pretty cloying. Still, from an advertising perspective, it’s an effective piece of work, wouldn’t you say? It makes a lot of points in a short span of time, it demonstrates the capabilities of the product, and it tells a story.

That story goes something like this:

Elliott, a shlubby and somewhat sadsackish dude, has recently lost his wife. Terrible. But there’s an upside: with mom out of the way, Elliott’s cute daughter Jess is finally paying attention to him. Jess is at college, and even though her walls are festooned with the latest in dorm room chic, she’s real sad and stuff. Well thank heavens for Google Chrome. Via its suite of technologies, Elliott is able to eavesdrop on Jess’s life, just like in an episode of “Big Brother.” He sees her cavorting with her advertising-slick group of friends, sloppily emoting like a vidcam girl on Youtube, even cozying up to her painfully inoffensive boyfriend. And it’s all right there in his browser; he doesn’t even need to close the tab running Brazzers. All things considered, it’s a perfect trade-off: Jess feeds off being looked at, and Elliott is relieved to be looked to — to feel needed and fatherly and useful. It’s like that time two years ago when that 20-something at the liquor store was nice to him, and then he felt good for the rest of the day, because maybe it was proof that he wasn’t invisible.

Okay, so I’m reading into it a little. I can’t help myself. Porn and pervy sex are what I associate with vidchatting and remotely peeping into college dorm rooms. I imagine Elliott getting pinged by Jess as he’s surfing for netporn, then chatting pleasantly with her for a while, his pants shlumped down around his ankles. (“Hi honey. What? Oh . . . the lotion. My skin gets a little dry this time of year.”) Maybe I’d think differently if the ad showed Elliott actually doing something. But all it tells us about him is that he sometimes wears a tie. And we don’t know if it’s for a job or for a funeral. I’m guessing it’s not for a date, because who would fuck this guy?

I mean, this is a guy who can’t even say “goodbye” correctly: he flubs “see you later, alligator.” That’s a bit like flubbing the punchline to a knock-knock joke. And when Jess says she needs help unpacking, Elliott puts her off: he suggests that her mom would do a better job of it than he would. That’d be the mom who’s dead. Now, dead or not dead, I can see having some real trouble with packing. That’s an activity that involves decisions and visuospatial cogitating. Unpacking, though . . . that’s just taking shit out of boxes; you could almost do it by accident. And it’s telling that Elliott isn’t up to the task. But the real coup de grâce, in a figurative as well as a somewhat literal sense, comes when Jess beats her dad at an online game of swords. The ad takes care to show us the avatar labeled “Jess” at the very moment it decapitates the one labeled “Elliott.” The accompanying “whoosh” has a swift and definitive finality to it. It’s the sound of a man being put out of his futility. Hey, maybe mom isn’t dead after all. Maybe she just ran off with the pool boy. At least he can probably unpack.

The ad seems to be selling three interrelated ideas.

First is the notion that Chrome enables a seamless transition between live, in-the-flesh helicopter parenting and a new high-tech method, one you can do from the comfort of your office — or perhaps from a specially outfitted command station that you’ve built in your backyard for the express purpose of horning in on your kids’ lives.

The second is a fantasy about college that’s been edited and polished to appeal to parents. It’s a fantasy that seems derived from the brochures put out by college admissions departments, the ones designed to make you feel good about consigning your daughter to a lifetime of massive, soul-crushing debt. (They share a thing or two with the presidential campaigns.) In this fantasy, college is like summer camp for big children, filled with cheery banality. It’s also really hard work, something that requires fortitude on the part of the kid and constant “you can do it” boosterism on the part of the parent. In reality, of course, getting a bachelor’s degree is no special achievement: around 111% of white women manage to do it. Some even graduate without a venereal disease. But Elliott hasn’t read “I Am Charlotte Simmons.” He’s not up to speed on the sex habits of young people — and, probably, he doesn’t want to be. Let’s just hope he doesn’t log onto Chrome some evening to find Jess getting stovepiped by a couple of goatee’d exchange students. That’d be a lesson in packing.

The third and perhaps most salient idea being pushed here is meant to appeal to dads, especially those who feel estranged from their families and impotent in their roles as fathers. There are a lot of them out there these days. And yet men remain the early technology adopters. That’s why Google+ is like the sausage-party version of Facebook, a place where nerdlingers gather to talk about Unix and share articles about their own obsolescence. These are the guys most likely to give Chrome a spin. And to them this commercial offers an appealing fantasy: a vision of a world in which mom is gone and dad is free to use the one thing he’s good at — futzing with technology — to make his life contiguous with that of his daughter. It’s a bit like the fantasy presented in the movie “Taken,” starring Liam Neeson, only here the father’s capabilities are expressed in RAM and CPU cores rather than in machine guns and brawn. For these guys, the ad’s final moments, showing Jess thanking her father and then her smiling face in a succession of close-ups, each one seeming to say “I love you I love you I love you,” is like a benediction.  And maybe it constitutes its own sort of helicoptering — a sort of technology-assisted, always-hovering cloud of Jess, there to provide a constant stream of paternal consolation. And all right next to the tab running Brazzers.