The re-enactments of the show, even when they are bleak or disturbing or intimate, have a quality of distance that never lets you forget that you are watching reality at one remove; Zahedi’s performances especially, even when they are “sad,” are often comedic, playing up the absurdity of feeling. But the behind-the-scenes documentary footage is mesmerizing in a different way. It’s raw and disturbing. The second season of “The Show” includes footage of Zahedi and Field fighting about his direction and the script. They are cruel and nasty, as fights between couples can be. He yells at her; she taunts him and sticks out her tongue. At one point, she complains that Zahedi is being abusive. He turns to the cameraman. “Are you filming this?” he asks.

For what it’s worth, Zahedi never claims to represent people in their fullness. “It’s about subtraction,” he told me. In real life, we try to defuse tension, “lower the emotional temperature.” His work erases all of those moments. “It makes it less complex and it distorts it, but it makes it stronger.”

In other words, subjecting reality to art doesn’t make it less real or less true. It makes it more real and more true.

It’s never a difficult matter, in a magazine article, to make someone look bad. Not unlike “The Show” itself, a magazine article involves including some details and leaving out others in order to create a story line. But I became aware, the more time I spent with Zahedi and the people from “The Show,” that it would be unusually easy to vilify him. This is a man who has used his wife’s mother’s suicide as material. A man who feeds actors lines and sometimes hectors and even bullies them until he gets exactly the intonation and emphasis he wants. (Zahedi doesn’t allow actors to work up to a moment; all he cares about is the moment itself.) He surrounds himself with fans who work free, doesn’t hear “no” until it has been screamed a hundred times and declares anyone who isn’t sacrificing themselves to his vision to be an enemy of art.

At some time in the past — 50 years ago, two years ago — it might have been possible to watch “The Show” and agree with Richard Linklater when he said that Zahedi’s “body of work at the end of the day will be like a lengthy Walt Whitman poem. ... It will be one of the greatest poems ever written, because it applies to everybody.” Zahedi wants to be an example, to inspire others to reveal themselves as he does. But the culture is no longer inclined to universalize the lives of male artists, especially when those autobiographies use as material the lives of the women around them. This just isn’t a great time for male geniuses.

What’s more, there’s Ashley. I’m not going to say too much about Ashley, because she wishes she never agreed to be in “The Show.” (She asked me not to use her last name in this article.) She started as a fan who helped out on set. Then, during a period when Zahedi and Field were experimenting with an open marriage, Ashley dated him. She participated in Season 2 for a while, re-enacting the relationship — she comes across as sweet and sympathetic — but eventually she quit, so Zahedi replaced her with two actors (one to do the kissing scenes). Performing events that she felt badly about in the first place, and participating in the flattening of her life for the sake of a narrow and distorted story line, was a bad experience. “The thing that was alluring about this project was the idea of the truth,” she told me. “Then you get on set and you realize that it’s not the truth, but it’s Caveh’s truth.” She met Zahedi when she was 24. All in all, the experience has made her “more guarded and less trusting.”

Ashley looked miserable. I told Ashley my version of the truth: that I don’t think she looks unsympathetic in the show, that people are more likely to judge Zahedi, not her. She bristled. “I’m not the victim here, and I’m not going to allow myself be turned into a victim,” she said. She thinks that art is worth whatever pain it causes in the world, even the pain it caused her. Field threatened to sue over the show, but Ashley refuses to stand in its way. When Zahedi dies, he will leave behind a complete document of his life — not her life, but his life. That’s the goal of art, she said, her voice catching a little: to tell other people what it feels like to be alive.