I’m going to throw one of my friends under the bus right now and say this isn’t just something I have realised about myself. In fact, the only reason I grew to admit this crush is that we were talking about it in the first place.
I should clarify, I don’t mean Christopher Plummer as he appeared in his later years, although I am sure he was still perfectly charming. I mean Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music. Christopher Plummer in a naval uniform. Christopher Plummer standing sternly at the top of a staircase, looking deeply unimpressed by a house full of singing children.
Captain Georg von Trapp.
Yes. That one.
There is something particularly embarrassing about discovering a crush on a man who died before you were born. There is also something slightly strange about realising that a film you watched as a child has influenced your taste in men for years.
I don’t remember watching The Sound of Music as a child and thinking, I want to climb him like a sturdy Swiss tree… or, even worse, Daddy…
I was far too busy watching Maria run around Salzburg, distracted by the music and by how pretty Liesl was.
But revisit it as an adult, and suddenly the whole thing looks very different.
Christopher Plummer was, frankly, absurdly handsome.
And that realisation made me wonder when my attraction to him changed, if it ever did.
Perhaps some of our first cultural crushes aren’t really crushes in the conventional sense. They are templates.
Your First Cultural Crush
For many people, childhood films introduce us to particular kinds of people before we have the vocabulary to understand why we like them. The characters we liked, admired, or fawned over can become strangely revealing when we revisit them as adults.
Maybe it was Brendan Fraser in The Mummy. Maybe it was Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. Maybe it was Captain von Trapp himself. Hell, maybe it was all three.
As children, we don’t necessarily understand these characters romantically or sexually. We simply understand that they are compelling. They are brave, funny, protective, and invariably know what they’re doing.
Years later, we can look back and realise that the things we found comforting or exciting in those characters have become qualities we recognise as attractive.
It isn’t that six-year-old me was secretly attracted to Christopher Plummer; it is that six-year-old me was learning what a certain kind of man looked like.
And apparently I took notes.
Competence is King
Captain von Trapp is particularly interesting because, on paper, he is almost the opposite of the kind of romantic hero we might expect today.
He isn’t immediately charming. He is stern and emotionally restrained. He is grieving, yet deeply invested in duty and responsibility. But through this, he eventually, somehow, becomes deeply appealing.
Part of that is the story, of course. We watch him soften and see the man beneath the uniform. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Von Trapp, down to his core, is competent.
He knows how to run his household and how to command a ship. He takes responsibility seriously, whether that means protecting his children or standing by his convictions. In contemporary conversations about masculinity, attractiveness is often associated with confidence, charisma, humour, or emotional openness.
Von Trapp offers something different: responsibility.
There is something oddly romantic about watching someone who appears completely capable of dealing with the world. Maybe this says something about what attraction actually is. We don’t always look for the most charismatic person in the room. Sometimes we find the person who looks like they know what to do when everything goes wrong.
Which, admittedly, is probably a very inconvenient thing to discover about yourself.
Perhaps I’m not attracted to Christopher Plummer at all
There is another possibility.
Perhaps this isn’t really about Christopher Plummer, but about The Sound of Music itself.
Or, more specifically, about what The Sound of Music represents. It represents childhood, family, lazy afternoons, and a sense of belonging that feels written into the grooves of the film itself.
It’s nostalgia.
We often talk about nostalgia as though it is simply a longing for the past. But nostalgia can attach itself to people and objects in ways that are much more complicated.
Sometimes we think we miss a person when we actually miss who we were around them. I know this is true for me, and it is often why I miss specific people while equally knowing I don’t miss others.
Sometimes we think we want to return to a particular place when what we really want is the feeling we had there. The same could be said for our attraction to a particular person (cough Christopher Plummer cough) when what we are really responding to is everything they represent.
Christopher Plummer doesn’t just represent Captain von Trapp.
He represents a particular kind of adulthood, a perception of masculinity, old-fashioned romances, kissing in the rain, and saving the day, all while wearing a crisp white shirt and shiny black shoes.
And, for me at least, a particular perception of my childhood. Is it an accurate reflection of my childhood? No, that’s laughable. But it is what I like to remember when I look back on those years.
The Ladies Love a Man in Uniform
Now, I wouldn’t be doing my job properly if I didn’t mention the uniform. The Uniform.
Of course, there are things about a uniform that can be attractive, and I could write an entirely different article about this (I probably will), but Von Trapp’s uniform is interesting in itself.
It is particularly put together, rigid, and, well… uniform. It communicates all of his seemingly ‘unattractive’ qualities: his sternness, restraint, sense of duty, and lack of humour.
He wears this uniform, and the message is clear: there is no room for nonsense in the Von Trapp household.
And yet the film eventually asks us to look beyond that exterior. The sternness isn’t the whole man. Beneath it is grief, affection, fear, and love. Viewed from the present, this combination feels particularly interesting.
We have become much more comfortable with men expressing vulnerability, talking openly about their feelings, and rejecting traditional ideas of masculinity. And that is, broadly speaking, a great thing.
But that doesn’t mean some older forms of masculinity have completely lost their appeal.
Perhaps that is because some of the qualities associated with them still resonate. Some, I find, just are attractive. A reliable, responsible, protective man who exhibits self-control and a willingness to sacrifice something for somebody else is attractive.
These qualities aren’t inherently masculine, of course. But The Sound of Music packages them within a very particular image of the man: the father, the captain, the provider, the man who’s expected to hold everything together.
In this vein, I wouldn’t say that Von Trapp is attractive because he represents some perfect version of masculinity. I’d venture to say that it has something to do with him representing competence in a world where competence feels increasingly reassuring.
And then there is Christopher Plummer
Now, I know there’s a danger in over-intellectualising all of this.
Because sometimes a handsome man is just a handsome man, and Christopher Plummer was extremely handsome.
There is something quite funny about the fact that children watching The Sound of Music are generally far more interested in Maria, the Von Trapp children, and the prospect of running around the Alps singing Do-Re-Mi.
Watching it as an adult feels like an entirely different experience. You notice the voice, the uniform, the height… the cheekbones, and you think:
Oh. I get it now.
Suddenly, you understand why audiences in 1965 were apparently having a very different experience.
This might just be the real phenomenon of the childhood cultural crush. It isn’t that we had adult desires as children. It is that we were already absorbing stories about what was admirable, comforting, exciting, and beautiful.
We were learning the language of attraction before we knew that was what we were doing. Attraction is, after all, subjective. So maybe I don’t have a crush on Christopher Plummer. Maybe I have a crush on nostalgia. Maybe I have a crush on competence.
Maybe I have a crush on a particular kind of masculinity that has largely disappeared from popular culture.
Or maybe I just really like Christopher Plummer in a naval uniform.
Not every cultural analysis needs to end in a thesis and sometimes the conclusion is just… Christopher Plummer was fit.
