Apocalypse Now is so overheated and pretentious, in fact, that the best way to explain its thematic
core might be through an examination of the ways it uses three T.S. Eliot poems (The Wasteland, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The
Hollow Men) and nods obliquely towards a fourth (The Dry Salvages, which refers to the animalism of rivers as the «
brown god»).