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" One of the first rules of criticism is to judge things under the terms they set for themselves. You don&amp;#039;t pick up a Stephen King novel and ask why it isn&amp;#039;t as profound as The Wasteland; you don&amp;#039;t go and see a Lars von Trier movie and wonder why it isn&amp;#039;t as fast-paced as a Bourne franchise. Different works of art are made for different audiences, and a decent reviewer judges whatever he or she is reviewing by the standards on which it&amp;#039;s operating. Unfortunately, that rule makes it pretty much impossible for me to tell you whether the latest and last in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn \u2014 Part 2 (which opens in theaters Thursday night), is any good. It wasn&amp;#039;t made for me or for anyone whom I can imagine reading this. Even attending the screening \u2014 mainly attended by teenage girls dressed to the nines, occasionally with their mothers \u2014 made me feel creepy in the extreme. A few questions: Are you a young girl? Do you follow trends slavishly right to the end? Do you have a level of sexual repression that would be more suitable to a Bronte sister than anyone who lives in the twenty-first century? If you answered no to any of the above questions, then Breaking Dawn \u2014 Part 2 is not for you.  The Twilight series is important not insofar as it provides a good night at the movies, but for what it reveals about the general psyche of the moment. I&amp;#039;ve argued before that vampires for straight women are roughly equivalent to lesbian pornography for men. The Twilight series takes the vampire fantasy well beyond the realm of mere sexuality, though. In Breaking Dawn \u2014 Part 1, Bella (Kristen Stewart) is nearly eaten alive by the half-immortal child in her womb, one of the weirdest and most profound expressions of the horror of motherhood, experienced as a kind of life in death, I&amp;#039;ve ever seen. Breaking Dawn \u2014 Part 2 is postnatal. It examines Bella&amp;#039;s married domestic life, her fulfillment as a person. (&amp;quot;I was born to be a vampire,&amp;quot; she says.)  The movie plugs into some pretty deep desires. Recently I was seated at a conference next to a professor of psychology who studies the role that ovulation plays in the relations between men and women. The biological imperative is strong even when it&amp;#039;s not evident. Men are more attracted to ovulating women who look no different than non-ovulating women, for example. Strippers who are ovulating make significantly more money than strippers who aren&amp;#039;t. This particular psychologist&amp;#039;s research showed that women who are ovulating tend to desire &amp;quot;bad boys&amp;quot; more and that women who are not ovulating tend to desire steadier, less dangerous men. I found this insight incredibly depressing, both for men and for women. You can either be a sex god or a good husband, and the reliable men are at a disadvantage in having their genes passed down. I assume that vampire movies are not suitable for peer review in important psychological journals, which is too bad for the psychologist, because Breaking Dawn \u2014 Part 2 suits her theory down to the ground. Bella has two men in her life; one is pale and immortal and totally reliable, the other is rough and dark and strong and occasionally becomes a wolf. (The audience giggled for two solid minutes when Taylor Lautner took off his shirt.) The werewolf Jacob has &amp;quot;imprinted&amp;quot; on Bella&amp;#039;s daughter Renesmee, while she&amp;#039;s married to Edward. So Bella effectively has the two husbands that every woman wants but must choose between in real life.  This profound act of wish fulfillment is followed by others that are more shallow. Since they don&amp;#039;t have to eat or sleep and never weaken, Bella and Edward can literally have sex nonstop. Other vampires have had sex for a decade at a time. Bella, it turns out, is stronger even than other vampires. She is better than others at resisting the urge for human flesh. She has a special power for projecting herself as a &amp;quot;shield,&amp;quot; to protect other vampires. The story is consumed with Bella&amp;#039;s attempt to protect her child from evil European vampires. To do so, she gathers other, interesting vampires from around the world, to aid her cause. Renesmee, as half-living, half-vampire child, grows prodigiously and will live for hundreds of years, it turns out.  The Twilight movies are so hugely popular that they amount to a collective dream, and Freud said that every dream is the fulfillment of a wish that cannot be accessed any other way. That&amp;#039;s exactly what makes Breaking Dawn so revealing of otherwise hidden desires. To sum up, this is what women want: never to die, to have sex unbounded by physical reality, to have super-strength, to be able to protect everyone they love just by willing it, to have a precocious daughter with a cool name who never dies, and to have lots of interesting cosmopolitan friends who will happily visit the rural Pacific Northwest. Really, is that too much to ask?  Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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