Sheriff Hopper and Patton Oswalt Were Steve and Dustin in Real Life. Stranger Things, Indeed

I did not know that David K. Harbour and Patton Oswalt are friends in real life. More to the point, I don’t know how anyone would know they are friends in real life. But the more I think about it, their friendship makes a lot more sense than Steve and Dustin’s.

Truth be told, I lived through the exact same mall/video arcade/”Back to the Future”/geeklife/pop culture 1980s that is essentially the main character in “Stranger Things,” and I was definitely more of a Dustin than a Steve. Which is to say, a Dustin who wasn’t smart enough to go to Science Camp and not confident enough to have pulled a phone number from Suzie, who was way out of my league. And Steve’s did not hang out with Dustins. We didn’t go on adventures together, least of all the kind where we do battle with oppressive regimes threatening democracy around the world. So that whole dynamic between the two of them just seemed farfetched from a narrative perspective.

That is, until now. If a handsome, popular-looking ladies man type like David K. Harbour can be real life friends with a nerd like Patton Oswalt, the Steve-Dustin thing makes perfect sense somehow. It’s art imitating life as it imitates art. The worlds of entertainment in the 80s and entertainment in the 2010s folding back on one another. Creating a sort of Upside Down of their own. And the sort of thing that Twitter was invented for. What a world we live in. It’s so much better than the 80s ever could be.